So your guitar is dead. Humidity has bent the wood, heat has melted the glue and you dropped it down the stairs as a you were running from screaming fans — or just knocked it off the table while you were reaching for your water.
What do you do now?
Here are five ways to recycle your broken guitar giving your busted instrument a new lease of life.
1. Create A Guitar Planter
Take a saw, slice through the middle of the guitar vertically so that you cut alongside the neck. Line the inside with plastic (a garbage bag will do) and fill with soil and plants. Place on your porch or in the yard and you’ll have an attractive, musical flower garden.
2. Build A Bird House
That hole in the middle of your guitar might be useless once the wood has bent and the neck has cracked but to some poor bird with nowhere to live, that’s a five star palace with room for all the family. Just remove the strings, tack on a bit of rubber to keep the rain off and glue in a shelf for some lucky sparrow to build a nest.
Nail it to a tree and you’ll have the most musical birds in the neighborhood.
3. Build A Doll House
If you’re feeling really creative, once you’ve pulled off the strings, you can take a jigsaw to the front of the guitar, slice out a larger opening and glue in a shelf. Paint the back walls, or paste up some wrapping paper, and build some miniature furniture, and you’ll have a very pretty dolls house for one lucky little girl.
It worked for Fairy Meadow Miniatures. Ruin your guitar and it can work for you too.
4. Make A Place To Hang Your coat
If there’s really no way that your guitar can come back to life, you may as well cut its head off. You can then mount that head on your wall as a warning to other guitars — or at least as a place to hang your coat. You’ll just need to add a hook to the bottom and place it behind the door.
Get careless with your other instruments and you might find that you have enough room to hang an entire closet.
The Lakeside Collection used to sell these coat hangers but if you’re not going to look after your guitar, you can easily make your own.
5. Use It As A Speaker
Of course, guitars were really meant to make music, and Makezine once explained how you can turn an old guitar into a lovely set of speakers. It doesn’t come to much more than cutting a large hole around the sound hole then another just below it. Place the speakers inside and drill a small hole at the bottom for the wire. Very easy.
Alternatively, you could just look after your guitar, keep it safe from heat and humidity and not knock it off the table. Then you could use it to play music.
