Leaderboard

... at least at my home: Recently I discovered this beautiful neon sign (not LED!). I suspect that it is from the 80s or 90s. I even had to buy a step-down transformer to be able to use it. Amazing that it survived all these years unharmed. With more than 40 Hamer guitars in my collection, it seemed to me to be the cherry on top. I hope you like it too.

Write an article about fake Gibsons for Vintage Guitar. Use a photo of your Chibson. Then advertise the guitar for sale as "featured in Vintage Guitar Magazine." You might even make a profit.

Hi Folks, First off this is not a plea for money, I appreciate all the support that people send, and I plan to keep the HFC going until it doesnt makes sense. Feel free to read as much or as little of this as you like but I wanted to be transparent on whats going on. As many of you may be aware we have been struggling over recent months. Our hosting company was sold last year and things continual are getting worse. The service being the most obvious as you may have noticed frequent 503 errors due to them reducing the amount of resources available. They have also increased our hosting prices by over 300%. furthermore, the plan we are on no longer works for us due to the resource demands from the board and the only option for staying is Virtal Private Server which cost exponentially more than of a traditional shared hosting account or offloading the board to invision cloud hosting but that alone is over $1000 per year and I dont want to lose the other pages. This really maked me miss the old days when I hosted the HFC on a throw away 386 running linux and apache in the basement of my inlaws office. Anyway, over the last few months I have been trying to find a situation that was reasonably affordable. I am planning to move hosts and am close to narrowing down my choice. The initial costs are reasonable as they give you a deal for a year then increase your monthly the next year. One of the issues is the size of the database as I have been retaining ALL posts from when we first moved to invision 20 years ago. I like the idea of having them available to search and revisit. However, I might need to drop quite a few or them. If I do, I will keep a copy and maybe bring it back up under an archive site. We'll see. I am working on keeping the recent stuff going first. What you need to know is this migration is going to happen soon, likely in the next two weeks. The site may be down or unavailable for a while as I migrate data. maybe days but I am hoping to avoid that. Please give me some grace on that as I do have a real job as well which has been very heavy. Lastly, I want to thank each and every one of you for being here. YOU are the HFC not that site and I am going to do my best to keep this clubhouse going as long as I can. your friend Ted Martin

Someone really likes Blitzes...

Pics of how it looked when I got it and how it looks now. Prefer to meet in person driving distance from DC area. Guitar and case are all original to the best of my knowledge, with the exception of the switch tip and possibly the brass nut. The volume pot for the neck pickup cuts in and out and probably needs to be replaced. I tried to clean it up with DeoxIT without success. There are some dings that don't photograph well, but nothing major in my opinion. This one has the 3-piece neck. The humbucker mounting rings are replacements that I thought matched the binding better, but the originals are in the case. I will follow up with more pics and will attempt some neck measurements if I can find my calipers.

After tons of hours and thousands of co-pilot messages (amazing really) to figure out the new host created a broken VPS. The site should be back and better than ever. Beat it up and let me know what you find. That said. IPB message board we use has become bloated and is bugging me to constantly buy updates and move to their cloud services. It's to the point that I am ready to jump to another forum product. I am not planning on doing it this week. But likely in the future. If you are interested check out xenforo, its lighter weight, has a very similar feature set and much more appealing licensing. Thanks all for your patience. I appreciate every member of the first and best damn guitar forum on the internet for over 30 years your friend Ted Martin For those that have no clue what I am referring to see the back story here:

Thanks for EVERYTHING you do behind the scenes and right out in the open here for the HFC! I can’t believe that I’ve been on this board for close to half my life, but it’s all because of you taking the plunge and making it happen. I think most of us here have made great friends, bandmates and even adopted siblings. It truly is (and has always been) the best hangout on the dubayew dubayew dubayew. You rock, Ted!

Did Gene go to stomp on a pedal and stomp on your foot by accident? 😁

A total knucklehead got banned from here for trying to pass one of those off as the real thing when he 100% knew better. That was the last straw after he had proven himself to be a bit of a scammer and just overall weirdness.

Still got mine, including the sustainblock trem arm hardware.

Kurt made one for Brad Whitford and one other for a guy in New York (he can't tell me). Both were creamsicle orange. Mine's a different color...

Good News! I have a reasonable host and am in the process of setting things up. Fingers crossed it goes well. I'll keep you posted. So far, its been a grind, but so good. Cant wait to ditch this crappy host

I totally dig these Blitzs 🤩 Here are mine

You can probably have one made for the cost of what... four Rush concert tickets?

Nice! I'm still hanging on to this one.

Gone to a place where a nickel still plays the jukebox. Another bought you a glass of warm beer. He was odd but incredibly original. Did tours consisting of nothing more than prisons and small bars. All with beat up Peavey PA equipment. Truly the wandering minstrel that drank to much, smoked to much and you never had to wonder what he was thinking. An American Original! RIP Mr. Coe

Thanks for the update, all the best for the move! The hfc is quite fabulous. The only forum I activley follow. Cheers! C.

All of this Corrosion of Conformity talk on the thread a couple of weeks back made me take another shot at an SG. I need a dedicated guitar for tuning to D standard. Found a pretty good deal on a 2016 SG HP someone had thoughtfully improve, i.e., removing the G-Force tuner. I thought the titanium nut and the sculpted heel were cool ideas. I like the thought of easily being able to raise and lower the nut, particularly for something I am going to set up for DOOM. What I was not prepared for was the "soloist" neck. Gibson wasn't joking around by calling it a "soloist" neck because it feels exactly like my 98 Jackson Soloist. You may like or hate that depending on preference, but I think it is pretty cool. Maybe I will actually keep an SG for once. I also have swapped some pups on a tobacco burst LP traditional and threw in some Gravelin pups he made for me awhile back. I sold the guitar they were in, but kept the pickups. Proof positive that modern LPs have a more pronounce arch than the Norlin era LPC they came out of. The treble pickup ring cracked IMMEDIATELY. Should have thought of that before I thought of that!

Well guys, the guitar is now ON HOLD. So, it looks it will stay in the HFC family, which always feels good —for some reason, that matters to us. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I found a misplaced certificate for a Newport Korina that I sold about 10 years or so ago. Had a bigsby I think. Serial number 4. 53778 . If you got , shoot me a message and I’ll mail it to you, s

I found it on "Kleinanzeigen". It's a website similar to "Craigslist". The seller is a musician himself (keybords) and had a studio in which he used the neon sign as decoration. He had acquired it many years ago when a music store closed down and now wanted to get rid of it. I had to pick it up in person, because he did not want to ship it for understandable reasons. I didn't even know that such a thing existed.

Hamer USA Artist Korina - 1990s - Natural | Reverb (needless to say, no affiliation) Somebody please buy this quickly so I can buy it from you when I've replenished the guitar account! 😉 Ad says, "Estate Sale," so I'm guessing details will be hard to come by. Looks like a 2001, though the ad says "1990's." Somebody here order this originally?

As an owner of the "Big Beautiful Book of Bass", I know that Geddy Lee has quite the collection. He does not however have a very early 4000 bass, which had a huge gold scratch plate, single horseshoe pickup, strange plastic and lucite bridge cover, and other things. Well, Rick did him a solid and made him one, though with a neck pickup so it would give him the sound he wants. Now I have no interest in having this bass. I already have a 4003 in Fireglo. I love how well it does the Rick thing. However you can bet your ass that rich Rush / Geddy Lee fans have been activated by this. Apparently a second one was made in a more blue color with a Schaller bridge. I'm hoping that for once Rickenbacker decides "yes, we want to make money" and gives the people what they want. https://www.notreble.com/buzz/2026/04/27/inside-geddy-lees-new-custom-rickenbacker-4000v-bass-for-rushs-return/

yes

Reminds me of this one. Though, I like the factory paint job on yours!

…if anyone wants to stop by and mock me and/or Jon Kammerer Customs guitars.

No doubt

Crappy pic of my Blitz bass.

F**kin' Steve - you nailed it, buddy. Definitely mark it somehow, in some permanent fashion. Otherwise the next 'knucklehead'......

I've told this before, here it comes again; Growing up a huge Sabs fan, I played 2 SGs thru high school & Jr college. 1st was a strange 1972 model w/ bigsby, LP type raised pickguard, and semi circle top mounted controls. 2nd was a 70s white SG that I spraypainted, added a Kahler & DiMarzios. Played that one until the head stock snapped off (didn't realize that it could be fixed, junked it). About 20 years ago I briefly had an Epi Tony Iommi SG that I couldn't bond with (you can't go home again). SGs and LPs are so damn iconic and cool, but I'm not a fan of their feel.

Yeah, I just saw two more photos posted of the blue one... danng.

You rock Ted, thank you so much for all you do to keep this place running, there really is nowhere else on the interwebs quite like it.

What do you want to know? I was assembling them at the cs in 2009, 2010. They're nice. (Big necks)

$5k the new tree-fitty?

Thanks for the heads up @Jimbilly. I made an offer and purchased it for $875. Fantastic guitar. Definitely punches above it’s weight.

Let's not forget who started the longest living, most active thread in the history of the HFC. I walked so that you could run.

I'm down for the 100th Anniversary Jam in 2075! I'll be 109 years old and still posting boobie pictures and still not playing guitar.

That is the absolute coolest!!! oh and dibs! 😃

IIRC, they are sized very small, so a "large" would be a medium or smaller.

Pretty good deal. 2003 Robin Wrangler - Gig bag - $1,000 shipped https://reverb.com/item/96521223-robin-telecaster-natural

Steve Goodman…

That was penned by Steve Goodwin and John Prine. David just made it more "Perfect"

I have had 5 or 6 SGs over the years and sold all but the 2 (3, if you count the really capable Epi SG) I have. Somewhere on here is the sordid tale of the 50th Anniv. Lim. Ed. Diablo w/ factory Floyd and 24 frets, that I sold and then spent years trying to replace. Found a nice one in the UK. Not long after, I realized that I really needed a fixed bridge version for AC/DC, Sabbath and other fixed bridge-type material. So I found the 50th Anniv. in the hard tail version (also w/ 24 frets ) and have been alternating between that and my blocked and locked CS LP Axcess at rehearsals, gigs & appearances.

Man, that is a perfect obituary for David Allan Coe.

Love the black! Newer (i.e., smaller, lighter) 2TEK, too!

I like him a lot. WAY back when, our band covered a couple of his tunes......More Than One Way Home and Standin' At The Station. They were crowd pleasers. (Even if I was then using a modded Hamer Artist rather than an M3).

I'll wait for the none more blue one. It's bound to sound best.

Oh man don't even get me started on the prices of Concert Tickets, with or without the involvement of Ticketmaster / LiveNation. Here's the second one they made, which is more my style. I have no idea what the control setup is, but IIRC, Geddy lee is pretty much both pickups FULL OUT on his Jazz and Ricks.