Ten years ago, Fender and Signal put out a cardboard Stratocaster that made the rounds online and promptly disappeared into the “cool but impractical” category of guitar experiments. Burls Art saw it and had a different reaction: he wanted to build his own. Not as a replica, but as a legitimate exploration of what corrugated cardboard could do as a guitar-building material. The result is a 4.42-pound fully functional electric guitar that sounds surprisingly good and raises some interesting questions about material choices in instrument design.
The concept isn’t about gimmickry or standard internet clout-chasing, it’s about pushing cardboard to its structural limits while keeping the guitar genuinely playable. Burls Art started with recycled corrugated cardboard sheets, laminating them with resin into blanks thick enough to shape into a body and neck. The key was saturating each piece thoroughly while letting excess resin drain through runners, leaving the corrugated channels mostly hollow. This gave him blanks that were roughly 70% air but rigid enough to route and carve like traditional tonewoods.
Designer: Burls Arts
The body came together relatively smoothly. He used a router sled instead of risking the planer, carving in standard contours – a belly carve on the back, an arm bevel on top – that wouldn’t look out of place on any conventional Strat-style build. The visual effect is unexpectedly compelling: from up close, the corrugation creates a textured, almost screen-like appearance, but step back and align your sight line just right, and the guitar becomes nearly transparent, with just the outline visible through thousands of tiny cardboard channels.
The neck presented a more complex engineering challenge. String tension on a guitar neck isn’t trivial, we’re talking about roughly 100-150 pounds of force depending on string gauge and tuning. Cardboard, even laminated cardboard, doesn’t immediately inspire confidence in this application. Burls Art’s first approach drew inspiration from an unexpected source: the Wiggle Side Chair he’d seen at the London Design Museum, which alternates the grain orientation of its cardboard layers for added strength. He tested two lamination methods – one with consistent orientation, another alternating… and the results were dramatic. The alternated pattern withstood 125 pounds of force before breaking, compared to just 37 pounds for the standard orientation.
The first neck, despite being theoretically strong enough, had a fatal flaw: the edges kept peeling and creating rough, jagged surfaces that would be uncomfortable to play. This is where real-world application diverges from lab testing, a neck that can withstand string tension in theory still needs to feel right in your hands. Rather than continuing to troubleshoot the alternating pattern, he pivoted to a fully resin-saturated approach, essentially creating a cardboard-epoxy composite. It’s heavier, sure, but the cardboard fibers act like fiberglass reinforcement, preventing the cracking issues you’d see in a pure resin neck while giving him a surface that could be carved smooth and fretted without delamination issues.
Weight became the next puzzle. That resin-saturated neck was too heavy for the ultra-light body, creating the dreaded neck dive – where the headstock droops toward the floor when you’re wearing the guitar on a strap. He carved aggressively, removing as much material as possible without compromising structural integrity, using the balance point at the neck plate as his target. The final setup required dropping down to Super Slinky strings to reduce the tension demands on the truss rod, which makes sense when you’re working at the edge of a material’s capabilities.
Hardware mounting in corrugated cardboard requires creative problem-solving. You can’t just screw into hollow channels and expect it to hold. For the bridge, he fabricated a resin-saturated cardboard backplate that gets inset into the body, creating a clamping system with the cardboard sandwiched between the bridge and plate. The electronics cavity cover uses magnets paired with screw heads hot-glued into the corrugation – a cleaner solution than trying to thread screws into this material.
The finished instrument plays better than you’d expect. Action is solid, intonation holds, and the sound quality is legitimately good with its pair of lipstick single-coils. There’s an interesting side effect from the flexible body: it’s exceptionally responsive to vibrato from arm pressure. Apply a bit of force with your forearm and you get pronounced pitch modulation, far more than you’d get from a traditional solid-body design. Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends on your playing style, but it’s the kind of unexpected behavior that makes alternative materials interesting.
The tactile experience is admittedly different from your standard Stratocaster. The surface has a sticky quality against fabric, and the edges are intentionally rough – he could have added wood binding to smooth them out but chose to keep it authentically cardboard. At 4.42 pounds, it’s 3-4 pounds lighter than a typical electric guitar, which puts it closer to laptop weight than instrument weight. That’s legitimately remarkable when you consider it’s holding tune under full string tension.
This isn’t going to replace your main gigging guitar, and Burls Art isn’t suggesting it should. But it’s a genuine exploration of material science applied to lutherie (the craft of making stringed instruments), the kind of project that answers questions nobody was asking but everyone’s curious about once they see the results. The original Fender collaboration was proof of concept. This is proof that with enough ingenuity and willingness to iterate past initial failures, cardboard can be a legitimate choice for guitar-building… after all IKEA’s made tables out of the same material too.
The post This Cardboard Guitar Is 70% Air… But It Still Plays Like A Fender first appeared on Yanko Design.
