Electric Guitar Review

It’s A Lava Lamp, It’s A Box Of Crayons, It’s…

Well, it’s Friday again folks (thank gawd!) and I thought I’d get silly and point you towards this insane little bit of luthier workmanship from Fender’s Custom Shop––nicknamed the “Splato” Stratocaster, or Splat-o-caster for short.

The guitar, which was dreamt up by one Jimmy Stout, of Palmdale, California, was apparently submitted as a sketch to Guitar World Magazine’s “Design Your Dream Guitar” contest back in ’04, and low & behold the sketch won top honors. So, Jimmy’s sketch was sent off to Fender’s Custom Shop to be designed and built by long-time Custom Shopper Scott Buehl.

The result is either a nightmare or a dream (depending on your taste,) but you’ve got to give Fender points for ingenuity––they apparently had to come up with their own cocktail for the colored, lava lamp-like swirling fluid in the guitar’s body, and the body itself was apparently pounded out of a sheet of 5052 aluminum alloy.

You can read the whole frightening story over at Fender’s “Splato” Stratocaster page. (Sketch by Jimmy Stout. Photo by Steve Pitkin.)