A scrapped engine block sits in a Slovenian workshop. Machined edges, bolt holes, combustion cavities. Decades of mechanical life pressed into cast metal. Most people see junk. Vlado Plateis sees a guitar body.
That’s it, elevating old car machinery to musical works of art.
Plateis takes discarded engine heads and builds fully playable electric guitars around them. The scars and the rough machinery remain.
The history of whatever car gave its life to the road stays. The engine arrives as itself and leaves as itself, except now it makes music.
The visual effect is genuinely strange. Standard guitar hardware sitting against rough cast metal feels like a collision of two worlds that had no business meeting.
The tuning pegs are precise, factory-made, identical to a thousand others. The engine casting is heavy and irregular and marked by time. Together they make something neither could be alone.
What keeps this from being a novelty is the discipline behind it. Plateis doesn’t paint the metal. Doesn’t dress it up. Doesn’t try to make it look like anything other than what it is. That restraint is the whole design.
A Toyota Corolla head looks nothing like a Mitsubishi Colt head, which means no two guitars share a silhouette. He isn’t imposing a shape. He’s finding one that was already there.
“I don’t create for the masses. I create for those who feel.
For those who seek character, not copies.”
-Vlado Plateis
Pick one up and you’ll know immediately it’s not like anything else you’ve held. These are dense, heavy objects.
They don’t let you forget what they are. In a world of things designed to be light and frictionless and forgettable, there’s something almost defiant about an instrument that demands your full physical attention.
Upcycling as a concept has been so thoroughly commercialized that it barely means anything anymore. Plateis Guitars feels like the real version.
See more on the Plateis Guitars website. Via DesignBoom.
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