Thursday, June 26, 2008

Manne Malt Whisky Guitar

Posted by Jon in • Cool Guitars, Crazy Guitar Designs,

Manne Special Edition Whisky Guitar
Whilst reading my daily guitar rss feeds I came across a very interesting guitar over at Thumbrella by Italian guitar company Manne Guitars established in 1987 by Andrea Ballarin in Schio, in northeastern Italy. Manne guitars’ main shape is quite unique just check out the Taos to see what I mean. Well it turns out that aside from their regular guitars, their Semiacustica and 8 string model they also have a couple of special edition guitars, one of which is the Malt Whisky.

For the Frankfurt Musikmesse Manne Guitars decided to make a very special project, a guitar constructed from a Lagavulin Malt Whisky cask. Lagavulin is one of the oldest Scottish distilleries on the Hebridean Island of Islay.

“After the wood was dried we started to work on the project to solve various problems due to the dimensions and condition of the wood. The heads, the two flat round sides of the cask, were the ideal solution for creating the back of a guitar body, to preserve the original surface with the characteristic painted brandings. There are just two of them so there was material enough for just 2 guitars.”

By using the cask heads they managed to keep the original stencil lettering which they used for the back of the guitar and then the solid oak was chambered to give the guitar more resonance and reduce the overall weight, I imagine a lump of oak hanging around your neck would cause some serious back pain otherwise!

“To protect the wood we worked out a very special formulation of odorless oil mixed with a fabulous whisky: the Lagavulin 91-07 distillery edition that very probably was the original cask’s content. This particular formula will keep the body preserved with the original whisky taste… All hardware was antiqued to match the body finish style.”

The finished result looks fantastic, check out the wooden tone and volume pots as well as the wooden pickup selector!