feedbackismyfriend said:
btw Mike is it correct to assume that there will be demos of this beasty soon?
Very yes, I've got a bunch of new stuff to do demos off BTW - Digitech RP-250, a Peavey Rage 158 amplifier, a Yamaha Pacifica 112V, and maybe a new one with the Mustang and the Jag-Stang since I replaced the Nut on the Mustang and the Vibrato on the Jag-Stang (I wore that sucker plum out in the last 3 years, literally broke the bar).
The background on this model was this....
Paul Dean had a 60's Strat in one of his former bands that he got for a Gibson Les Paul he fixed up. That guitar was smashed and then put back together by him using plastic wood (LePage's Bondfast), it had a break at the 10th fret that made it resonate, and then he left the guitar in a hot trunk and the glue loosened and it went to crud again, so he made another neck for it, sort-of Telecaster style, put 2 grooves parallel to the truss rod on each side (Tone Channels he called them), reinforced the body with pine/fir, used plastic wood to fill a cavity under the pickguard, made a pickguard out of Anvil case material, and put in a set of hopped up DiMarzio single coils in it, painted the guitar red, and used it on the first Loverboy album. That was the intial prototype to the ideas behind this guitar.
Apparently later he bought an Attila Balogh guitar (the one in the Working for the Weekend Video), copied the horns onto something stratlike for his own body design, and made a bunch of guitars that look like the Hondo with different pickups from P-90's, to strat pickups, to 2 old DiMarzio Super II humbuckers. He also copied the plastic wood, tone channel, bridge, and pickguard ideas from that strat for these guitars. Some luthiers from Attila Balogh got together and formed Odyssey Guitars, and made 50 copies of at least one of these guitars for a promotion sometime about 81'/82'.
Somewhere around late 82' (me figures), Paul got in contact with Hondo Guitars headquarters in Texas and they took one of his "prototypes" in and copied it (probably the Odyssey with the twin humbuckers used in the introductory ad I saw for this guitar on vintaxe.com). There were 2 versions made, this 2 humbucker version (availible with DiMarzio Super II Pickups for additional cost), and the Paul Dean III which had 3 single coil pickups and was essentially a japanese assembled Hondo Stratocaster copy with a Paul Dean II Body, Neck, and Pickguard.
Almost all the PD-2's I've seen are transparent red, the only PD-III I've seen was a dark tobacco sunburst with a flame-maple-like top on it. The II only appeared in the 1983 catalog, while the III lasted through 1984. After that Paul took on an endorsement deal with Kramer guitars and came out with a non-pickguarded, pointy headstocked, floyd-rosed version of this guitar with 2 single coils and a humbucker (and a through body neck).
