Fun use for paper products...

December 5, 2015 8:24 PM

What if Fender made a Stratocaster... out of cardboard?
posted by dfm500 (20 comments total)

Cardboard Stratocaster? Sounds more like a Squier project to me.
posted by ckape at 8:35 PM on December 5, 2015 [5 favorites]

Hey, my office has a cardboard conference table! It's a few years old and still holds up to daily abuse. I am no longer skeptical about anyone's outlandish claims about cardboard's many uses.
posted by liamcampbell at 8:51 PM on December 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

Pepsi beige?
posted by oheso at 9:07 PM on December 5, 2015

My cat just started drooling.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:50 PM on December 5, 2015 [6 favorites]

How the hell did they make the neck strong enough? Resin? Then it's more a composite than cardboard. Looks hella cool, however.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:36 PM on December 5, 2015

Finally, a guitar you can really shred.
posted by sylvanshine at 10:45 PM on December 5, 2015 [7 favorites]

How the hell did they make the neck strong enough? Resin?

Watching them sand the body, it definitely looks like the cardboard is impregnated with something. I have no idea if that's done exclusively for the project, or if it's a special type of reinforced paper material the company makes.

I was wondering how the weight was compared to a wood Strat?
posted by Thorzdad at 1:55 AM on December 6, 2015

It's a genuinely beautiful guitar. I can imagine it spawning imitations (if only visually).
posted by howfar at 4:33 AM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Am I the only one hearing the question posed by the FPP in the voice of Phil Hartman as Lyle Lanley?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:45 AM on December 6, 2015

"Things were going great at Steve's concert until the humidity kicked in..."
posted by Wolfdog at 6:12 AM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

It looks great but is sounds often a bit out of tune to me, probably due to not having a truss rod for strength in the neck. The Fender scale length of 25.5 inches has a lot of tension in the strings/neck. The first Telecaster style guitar in 1950, the Esquire, initially had no truss rod in its pine neck but most ended up being returned/replaced because they were not stable. If a solid pine neck is not stable enough I'd guess cardboard even if in was impregnated with epoxy or something is going to have issues. I still want one though!
posted by drnick at 6:15 AM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think a titanium or stainless steel honeycomb version would be wicked cool, since they've shown they can work with non-solid materials.
posted by MikeWarot at 7:02 AM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

I wonder if it would be a lot more stable, albeit a lot less impressive-looking, if they had cut the cardboard to align the corrugations with the strings rather than perpendicular to them.
posted by ardgedee at 7:57 AM on December 6, 2015

It looks great but is sounds often a bit out of tune to me, probably due to not having a truss rod

You can see the cutout for the truss rod at 1:31 in the video.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:40 AM on December 6, 2015

I'm wondering how they hold the tuning pegs in place. Maybe they've physically connected them somehow to the truss rod.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:50 AM on December 6, 2015

Being a Strat could account for the tuning issues
sorry
posted by thelonius at 3:09 PM on December 6, 2015 [2 favorites]

What if Fender made a Stratocaster... out of cardboard?

It would be light, but have shit-level sustain and would feed back like a motherfucker every time it was within 180 degrees of the front of a plugged-in amp.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 3:16 PM on December 6, 2015

would feed back like a motherfucker every time it was within 180 degrees of the front of a plugged-in amp

You say that like it's a bad thing.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:34 PM on December 6, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah, looks like a normal truss rod, so I'm thinking the headstock area might be the least stable part.

Interesting experiment nonetheless. Danelectro offered a successful line of instruments that had tops and backs out of fiber board, basically thick and stiff non corrugated cardboard, through the 60s. Frames for the bodies look like they were stapled/glued 2x4 lumber. Those old bodies seem to have decent longevity. Presumably, they did it because it was a cheap process. I'm not sure if that economy could exist in today's market. Modern reproductions from Asia aren't less expensive than solid wood guitars.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:04 AM on December 7, 2015

The '58 Danelectro u2 in my lap is masonite, I guess we could argue that's cardboard, both being wood fibers.
posted by artdrectr at 3:20 PM on December 7, 2015