Recycling plastic into hard rock
A dumped oven, plenty of time and a ute full of plastic milk bottles was music to a handyman’s ears.
Nelson man Drew Fahey has been strumming away as a hobby for the past few years. He’s also an avid recycler so he figured, why not make an electric guitar out of used bottles.
Fahey said he ‘‘ground down milk bottles then melted them into a block and cut the body shape into an electric guitar’’.
Sounds easy but Fahey said it took plenty of ‘‘trial and error’’.
The first ingredient was retrieved from the local recycle centre – 183 bottles.
‘‘I had to clean them all one by one. That took ages.’’
To add to the labour, Fahey had a broken wrist at the time with six weeks off work.
He said grinding down the bottles was the first challenge.
‘‘I tried to use a standard blender, it just didn’t work. Then I hired a wood chipper; that didn’t work either. It kind of just sucked them in and spat them out.’’
Third time lucky, Fahey stumbled on Dr Diesel who had an industrial-sized plastic grinding machine.
‘‘I asked if I could bring a ute load of milk bottles and grind them up and he said ‘yeh that’s sweet’.
‘‘That machine worked really well,’’ he said.
The chips were then placed into a giant cake tin mould welded for the instrument.
Baking the plastic required more recycling, he said.
‘‘I bought an old oven from the dump and rewired that so it worked. Then I put the chips in the mould and cooked it down into a block.’’
To get it resembling something useful, Fahey made a stencil of the guitar he wanted then cut it out of the block.
The result is that the instrument’s harmony is ‘‘almost like my other store bought one’’.