Eighty-eight-year-old Lorne Collie has been making musical instruments for more than three decades, creations that dazzle for their unique materials as much as their sound.
There’s a hefty bass guitar and a cello made of moose antlers, a baseball bat violin, ukuleles made of cookie tins, and guitars fashioned from pitch forks, a shovel, and a rake.
His personal favourites? A frying pan mandolin and a banjo made of a motorcycle tire rim, covered by stretched deerskin painted by his late wife.
“When people wanted to buy them, I always said No,” Collie said from his home outside the tiny and remote Manitoba community of Hilbre, about 230 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg.
“I wasn’t hurting for money, but what I was afraid of is that if I started selling them, I would be working myself to death to try to keep up to the orders.”
Collie said he once turned …