Sven wrote:Phil O'Keefe wrote:It's probably a '56 Musicmaster that someone got creative with, carved up, and then refinished.
Definitely. The decal is probably some type of repro. I emailed the guy to try and fill him in, but I think he's hopelessly mislead.
That doesn't surprise me. You could have George Gruhn tell him that, and he still probably wouldn't believe it. He's probably either got too much money into a fake himself to want to believe the truth, or he's being deliberately deceptive.
Another suspect thing about that guitar - it has the post '64 pickguard shape. Fender wasn't using anything even remotely close to that shape in the 50s, nor did they use any pearloid pickguards back then either. You can explain away some things by trying to pass it off as a prototype, but if you were building a prototype, don't you think you'd generally use materials you already had on hand for things like pickup covers and pickguards? I would.
Look at the picture of the body with the pickguard off. That date area sure looks like it was taped off so it wouldn't be painted over when it was refinished. The paint color there matches what Fender used for primer back then. Also, the "swimming pool" route is also strongly suspicious. If it was a real prototype for a single pickup model, why route it differently than a stock Musicmaster? Even if you wanted to angle the bridge pickup (the original 50s era Musicmasters / Duo Sonics were routed with the bridge pickup slot parallel to the bridge), you'd normally just angle the body and route the single pickup slot, similar to how the pickup cavities on the mid-late 60s era Duo Sonic II's were done.
I'm not suggesting I know everything about every guitar prototype to come out of Fullerton, but I'd need better documentation, along with some other experts to authenticate it before throwing that kind of money down on any guitar - especially one with that many red flags.
