We've seen some crazy six-string designs over the years, like the none-more-punk guitar made entirely from skateboards, and the full-bodied guitar made of 5,000 coffee beans. But these new models from Georgia-based company Warrior Guitars – with designs akin to the aforementioned Burls Art builds – are some of the most psychedelic-looking yet.
Teaming up with the Songbirds Foundation – an organization dedicated to providing music education and resources to emerging artists – the company has developed a line of guitars built using Fordite.
This material is essentially hundreds of layers of automotive paint left over from spraying cars on the production line. It has a history of being used to make jewelry, but Warrior has taken it several steps further to create a new range of electric guitars.
Each guitar in the line features a different configuration of Fordite, with some boasting full tops made of the material, and others just pickguard and headstock.
“Just about the time you thought everybody had made a guitar out of every substance known to man, we discovered a new one: Fordite,” says Lead Design Thorpe McKenzie.
“After World War II, the automobile industry got into high gear manufacturing cars of all colors, and in the process they had these paint shops where the cars were hand-sprayed.
“And as this [paint] built up over the years on the tracks that the cars were pushed through the paint shop on, people realized after a while that you could chip this stuff off and fabricate jewelry out of it. It became known as Fordite, and we had the idea of using it for guitars.”
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For more information on these head-turning models, head over to Warrior Guitars.
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Sam was Staff Writer at GuitarWorld.com from 2019 to 2023, and also created content for Total Guitar, Guitarist and Guitar Player. He has well over 15 years of guitar playing under his belt, as well as a degree in Music Technology (Mixing and Mastering). He's a metalhead through and through, but has a thorough appreciation for all genres of music. In his spare time, Sam creates point-of-view guitar lesson videos on YouTube under the name Sightline Guitar.
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