Matt Artinger Was Put on This Earth to Design and Build Some of the Sweetest-sounding Guitars Ever Crafted. And When a Man Figures Out What He Was Put on This Earth to Do, He Is Fortunate Indeed.
A few years back, one of Matt Artinger’s customers had an idea. “He had run into some scrap aluminium sheeting from an actual World War II B-24 Liberator and he wanted to design a guitar with it,” says Artinger, a stocky son of Pennsylvania’s industrious Lehigh Valley, where he works out of a former elementary school in a town called Emmaus. “I thought it was the coolest thing on Earth, so of course I said yes.” Dubbed “Final Objective”, after the nose art on the vintage bomber from which its materials came, the resulting guitar incorporated not only the salvaged aluminium skin, replete with rivets, but also scrounged cockpit parts, a fretboard inlaid with the US Army Air Force logo and a scaled-down rendition of the original nose art.
Artinger said yes again when he was approached by a guitar-playing toy collector who sought a double-necked instrument to commemorate his considerable enthusiasm for GI Joe paraphernalia. “It had a custom paint job on it with Snake Eyes, a bad guy and it had one of the good guys. I don’t recall which good guy it was and I’m embarrassed about that because I was a GI Joe freak as a kid. It had .45-calibre bullets as the knobs and swords going up the necks,” he says. “It was insane.”
Esta historia es de la edición February 2017 de Popular Mechanics South Africa.
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Esta historia es de la edición February 2017 de Popular Mechanics South Africa.
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