The Master Builders at Fender Made a Playable Cardboard Guitar

What if everything could be made of cardboard? The team at Signal Snowboards (in collaboration with Ernest Packaging in Los Angeles) have been conducting experiments to see just how versatile the material is. So far, they have crafted and tested skateboards and snowboards with impressive results, and for their latest trial, Signal Snowboards partnered with master builders and musicians at Fender to see how a cardboard Stratocaster would shred, both literally and figuratively.

The process of creating a cardboard guitar is, not surprisingly, unlike the construction of a standard wooden instrument, mostly because the strength of the structures are very different. The Ernest Packaging team had to design the Strat to withstand the amount of torque that playing a guitar puts on each section. The Fender team received the corrugated cardboard design and were tasked with the challenge of shaping and building the product by hand so that it could play like a real guitar without crumpling.

The best part of the video is seeing the reactions of Fender's tuners and testers as they hold and play the one-of-a-kind guitar for the first time. Check it out above, and head to the Signal Snowboards YouTube page to see their other cardboard creations.