When customers enter Fred Mangan's guitar shop for the first time, they often say "How cool!", "Why?" and "It's beautiful!"

Guitars made from unusual materials, such as a TV satellite dish, alligator skin or old wood church organ pipes, hang in the front window and on a wall at Mangan's tiny storefront shop, Electric Guitars By Fred Mangan, at 2351 W. Augusta Ave. The shop has been open five months.

Mangan, 42, says, "Usually people are really kind" when they see the one-of-a-kind guitars he has created.

A bass guitar that features a large aluminum clock dial, plus a pistol placed under the guitar strings to create the bridge of the guitar, is one eye-catching instrument that Mangan made.

Becka Joynt, 31, a bass player in the band Quatre Tete, recently bought the clock dial bass guitar.

"It's like nothing I've had before, that's for sure," she says. "It's one of the coolest" guitars that she's ever had.

Talking about the unusual guitars at Mangan's shop, Joynt says, "They look un-functional" but actually work great. "He knows how to take something bizarre [and create something] that sounds really nice."

Joynt, who will be playing on tour in Europe soon with rocker Bobby Conn, says she probably won't be bringing the new bass guitar along to Europe. That's partly because she needs to get a special case for it and because "I'm not sure if I can take it on a plane because of the gun on it," she says with a slight laugh.

Mangan, who lives near Chicago and Damen, says he became good at repairing guitars growing up in Franklin Park. His family didn't have a lot of money to repair his own guitar, so after he wrecked his guitar about 30 times, he did everything he could to fix it up and make it sound better.

"There's really not any school where you can learn it," he says about repairing guitars. However, he says, "The more you do something, the better you get at it."

So, why build a guitar with a TV satellite dish?

"It looked crazy enough that it pleased me," Mangan says. He says if he thinks of a way he can make a guitar "fun and interesting," he'll go for it.

On a recent afternoon David Foster, a 23-year-old guitar player, plans on buying the TV satellite dish guitar for $400. Foster, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with a hole near the right armpit, says, "Basically, I just came in and I needed a guitar repair."

When Foster tried out the TV satellite dish guitar, though, he was charmed because it felt and sounded good. "You put it on, and it feels like a top-of-the-line Gibson," he says. Plus, Foster says, "He just gave me an awesome deal."

From a chair by the front window, Foster offers to play the TV satellite dish guitar and then places the guitar in his lap and hunches forward, with his dark, wavy hair framing his face. As his fingers zip along the frets, the chords and music phrases that he plays sound crystal-clear in a lively and rockin' way, showing that the guitar is indeed more than just something intriguing to look at.

Meanwhile one guitar in the window features a film reel as its body, and another guitar is made with some wooden organ pipes, which Mangan says he salvaged from a church pipe organ from 1885 after a church burned down on 47th Street.

An orthodontist bought a guitar that has the image of a pearly white tooth and plans on hanging the instrument at his office. Although the orthodontist may never play the guitar, Mangan says that the day that someone does play it, it'll sound great.

After all, Mangan says that he won't sell guitars that don't work well. "The biggest aspect of what I do is making it sound good," he says. "They play and sound as good as anything." He threw out three guitars that he worked on building the last year because he couldn't get them to sound great.

He also makes sure that the guitars are weighted properly, with the heavier part at the bottom, so that handling the instruments feels normal. The placement of screws for the guitar's strap holders becomes more critical on odd-shaped instruments like the clock dial bass guitar, so that often means a lot of tinkering to get everything just right.

Perhaps the most bizarre-looking guitar at Mangan's shop is a guitar covered with alligator skin that has an alligator's mouth at the bottom of the guitar.

In a side room Mangan pulls out a cabinet drawer, showing a stockpile of electronic parts and leather skins that he's saving for possible future projects. He says he knows someone who lives in the desert in Nevada who routinely kills rattlesnakes and sends the snakes' skin and alligators' skin to Mangan.

Mangan estimates that he spends 40 percent of his time doing guitar repairs and 60 percent of the time building guitars.

His customers tend to be between 40 and 60 years old, and many of them tend to buy his guitars more to display them than to play them.

While eyeing a guitar he built that has a Star of David-shaped body, he says, "There aren't a lot of people who want to play a Star of David [guitar], you know what I mean?"

He can spend a week to two years, the time he spent working on the alligator skin guitar, to create a guitar.

Electric Guitars by Fred Mangan, 2351 W. Augusta, is open noon to 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday. For more information, check out www.fredmangan.com or call 312-497-2418.