Here’s a Scotsman with a really cool voice successfully completing an incredibly difficult woodworking project. He’s taken 10,000 ice lolly (popsicle) sticks, dyed them in a suction chamber, cut them to a tiny size, glued them together to form cubes and then attached all the cubes to form the shape of the body of this Nintendo-themed guitar. And that’s just for the body. He makes the neck and head of the guitar by glueing the lollipop sticks together in a different way. Cranmer (first name unknown) describes the glue-up of the body as being the most stressful glue-up of his life. Considering the fact that he’s still in his early twenties when building this guitar, he hasn’t exactly had decades of glue-ups to compare this one to, but when you take that into account – what he’s achieved with only a few years of woodworking experience is pretty amazing.
Thousands of Wooden “Pixels” for Mario & Co.
Carpenter Cranmer couldn’t find a way to dye the popsicles sticks a pure white color, so he has used white perspex that he cut to the same size as the wooden sticks. When glued together, each square end of each stick is one pixel in the video game scene that makes up the body of the guitar. The bright white perspex pixels stand out beautifully against the colorful but slightly desaturated pixels provided by the dyed wood.
First, Cranmer cut his wooden popsicle sticks to size to prepare them for dyeing.
Scottish carpenter Cranmer used white perspex along with wood to make thousands of pixels for his Super Mario guitar.
Cranmer used a vacuum chamber to pull the wood dye deep into the wooden pieces.
Here’s the block of wood made out of one hundred tiny pixels that form the famous Nintendo game character Mario
An Ideal Instrument for Musical Gamers
I’m no expert on Mario characters, but I think the Mario princess that we see on this musical instrument is Princess Peach, in her pink princess dress with a jewel on her chest and a crown on her head. Cranmer has squeezed in a bunch of other famous Mario characters, including the famous Mario himself, his brother Luigi, clouds, mushrooms, pipes, turtles, carnivorous plants, and dinosaurs. (Like I said, I’m no expert on Mario game characters. I’m sure some of these have names that I’m clueless about). The amount of references to the Nintendo game in this one guitar is extraordinary. I think many people, including me, would have been impressed with a couple of pixelated inlays on a solid wood guitar body. The fact that Cranmer has made the entire fan art guitar, neck, head, fretboard included; out of wooden lolly sticks is super impressive, definitely worthy of the world-famous Mario Bros Nintendo games.
Cranmer has included a pixelated Bowser insert in the fingerboard of the guitar. He made this character in the same way as the video game characters seen in the rest of the guitar; by glueing together loads of tiny bits of wood in the correct pattern to create the illustration. He then cuts a slice of the character from the block, gouges out a space for Bowser to sit in before glueing the game character in place and sanding the surface smooth.
The body of Cranmer’s Super Mario guitar is made out of thousands of tiny pieces of wood, glued into blocks and then attached to form the shape of the electric guitar.
The brightly colored wood pieces laid out for glueing to make the neck of the guitar looks cool even before being cut and shaped.
This is the size of the wooden pixel pieces that Cranmer glued together to make the Bowser inlay.
The Bowser character inlay on the fingerboard of Cranmer’s Mario Bros guitar is so incredibly delicate and precisely made.
Let this Scottish Wood Wizard make Your Dream Guitar
Cranmer makes custom guitars from his carpentry workshop in Glasgow, Scotland. (Though you probably figured out that he’s Scottish from his accent and sense of humor!) You can see more videos by Cranmer on his Youtube channel, and follow him on Facebook or Instagram to see what new and amazing wooden guitars he builds in the future. Oh, and he has a website where you can order your very own custom built guitar online, made with Cranmer’s mad skillz, or buy some of his woodworking plans to build your own guitar.
The Super Mario pixel guitar isn’t just amazing to look at – it’s a functioning, playable musical instrument.
This close-up shows Cranmer’s finished Super Mario guitar complete with strings et al
Princess Peach peeks out from between the tuning knobs on the head of the Super Mario guitar
The white perspex pixels in the Mario fan art guitar stand out brilliantly against the dyed wood pieces, as seen on the green pipe and in the carnivorous plant.
Cranmer plays his finished Super Marios guitar that took seven months and a whole lot of patience and skill to build.
