I love the look of this Telecaster built by the Fender Custom Shop’s Yuriy Shishkov for Keith Urban. Country Music Television blogger, Alison Bonaguro, managed to get a little info out of Yuriy about how he designed and built it:

• Urban’s favorite Fender Telecaster guitar was flown to Shishkov so he could duplicate the neck and measure all electronic components.

• Urban didn’t want small square mirrors, but rather he insisted on the shattered pattern.

• It took about three months to build the guitar, which has about 160 pieces of mirror on it. (But to make that many perfect pieces, Shishkov had to cut about 600 to allow for mistakes. He told me, “It was all cut by hand, but to cut exact curved lines that you have drawn on the glass is like trying to follow the curvy line on the ice when you are ice skating. If you’re slightly off, you’re already wrong. Glass is an unforgiving material.”)

• And, he said, the true enemy in the process was that the weight of the glass is heavy. So he had to use the thinnest but strongest mirrors that money could buy: 1/16 of an inch glass, which is about as thin as a nickel.

• The elliptical sphere surface top has a slight arch to further disperse the reflections of the mirrors. And the light ash wood for the body was milled to reduce the thickness and weight. “When the guitar’s body was ready for the glass work, it weighed under 2 pounds,” Shishkov said. “It was the lightest body I had ever held in my hands.”

• Shishkov told Fender execs, “If anyone will ask for another one like this, tell them it’s $100,000.”