Six String Nation

[timouse]

apologies if this has been posted before. i remember hearing about this on the CBC a year ago, seems like a very cool idea. Jowi Taylor from the CBC has teamed up with luthier George Rizsanyi to build a guitar incorporating a wide range of "canadain artifacts."

Making the guitar a hollow-body acoustic, however, vastly complicates the task of building it. As musical construction goes, Mr. Rizsanyi's task could be compared to that of Dr. Frankenstein's efforts to create a human being from a collection of scavenged body parts. Among the items now in Mr. Rizsanyi's workshop are Pierre Trudeau's spruce canoe paddle, oak from Sir John A. MacDonald's board room table, a hemlock board from the world's longest covered bridge in Hartland, N.B., a length of mahogany decking from the Bluenose, a creosote-soaked beam from Halifax's Pier 21, and two sections of hockey stick — one was used by Wayne Gretzky at the peak of his NHL career, and the other wielded by Paul Henderson when he led Canada to victory in the final game of the 1972 Soviet series.

These wooden parts will be joined by a long list of metals and artifacts, including a walrus tusk, pieces of copper from the roof of the original library of Parliament and — providing that an underwater recovery operation can be mounted — a scrap of metal from the sunken wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Great Lakes freighter immortalized by singer Gordon Lightfoot.

full story here.