stonge

just finished twisting up a couple of replacement trem arms for wlm50 (I'll ship them out at lunch today) and noticed something interesting; the trem arm off my PRS DGT fits the Wilkie so that is another potential source (especially if you want one with the little plastic doohickey on the end). I wouldn't think there's any diff between the trem on the DGT compared to other USA PRSi so something like this might work too: https://reverb.com/item/5139967-prs-tremolo-arm-short-gilmour-style-black-strat (standard disclaimer - don't know the seller, never slapped a micrometer on the product but based on the descrip it might actually be compatible with a Wilkie. You do need precision-ground 3/16 diameter since it's a pretty close fit into the Wilkie bushing though).

I picked up a Danelectro baritone from an HFC'er up here a few years back that is a pretty decent guitar - plays and sounds good and the new ones are around 400-500ish. Best bang for the buck imho would be throwing a $200 Warmoth baritone conversion neck onto any strat or tele you have lying around (Birchwood Casey gunstock oil is an easy finish, and just add a nut and tuners and you're good to go).

The Pirate Special has wandered to the big city for a bit after relaxing at casa de stonge. The Pirate Special dig get to hang with with Nightwolf's Daytona as shown below.

saw them opening up for Blackberry Smoke last year - they were really good. At the end of the night they came back out for an encore on Refugee with Blackberry Smoke and that just killed.

You can make your own trem bars using precision ground 3/16 (.187 inch) stainless steel. It bends pretty easy in a bench vise - the toughest thing is hacksawing off the blanks since i don't have a bandsaw. I've got at least 12ft of that bar stock left in my garage so if you need a whammy bar to use from the next room lol...

I've had one of those on my Mesa mark 5:25 for the last couple of years; even a small amp jumps quickly in volume on the low end of the scale. It comes in real handy when mrs. Stonge is watching the game in the next room and doesn't want to use closed captioning lol. Also comes in handy at 3am when everybody else is sleeping.

Haha - I thought that one looked familiar. I think I sold that pair to you years ago. Those were really cool.

Without the production logs from Hamer, I don't know how anyone could answer this. Is this leading into another question like `will these be collectible someday?` or `what are my odds of finding another one like mine?` As far as collectibility probably not but that means you should be able to find them at reasonable prices. As a Fender-style built by a company known more for Gibson-style instruments it's a niche market at best. As far as finding another one like yours, ime that's pretty light for a T51 - most of the 93-95 ones I've played or owned have been northern ash and typically heavier (8-9 lbs) and I've never met one that had anything over a medium neck carve. I have a couple of 96 Daytonas that I think are alder but I'd guess they're still at least 8 lbs. The neck pockets are different from standard fender spec, so it's nearly impossible to find a replacement neck unless you swap between other Hamers. They are great guitars, but should be pretty reasonably priced if you can find another with specs you like or can tolerate.

I picked this one up last year, and it's as plain as they get - 2012 mahogany DGT Standard. It sounds and plays great - the neck pickup coil-taps to a great strat sound and the bridge does a pretty good tele approximation (even better the coil taps seem to run about 80% of the humbucker volume, so it gets the strat/tele tones without losing too much volume). Between the big frets and the scale length .011s are surprisingly easy to play (teles with .010s feel tougher to play in comparison), and that trem is very smooth and consistent (doesn't go out of tune very easily). It's heavier than I usually prefer (8 lbs 4 oz), but really resonates well. I wish i'd had this when the country band was playing out - I could have played this one for all three sets with all the tones it gets. It's in my top three with my parts tele and my Shiskov Ultimate, and has put a lot of my Hamers back on the basement shelving. I made a bad mistake being too tapped out to buy ArnieZ's when he sold it - someday I will get the maple-topped version to compare the sounds.

I picked up a Squire Classic 50's tele with Glendale saddles and a set of Fishman Fluence Gristletones - those pickups are really nice and versatile. There's a Fender 52 Hot Rod tele in parts in the basement with a Firebird pickup in the neck and a traditional single in the bridge (I could never get the noise out of that one - sounds like a blizzard in the Rockies with any gain - so it'll sit until I decide to try again or put it together to sell). Allparts has a nice chunky neck that gets good reviews on the TDPRI; if I wanted out of the box awesome I'd just spec out a new Musikraft blackguard neck though. Lots of choices lol.

alternately "you got your Duotone in my Variax" or "a telecaster, a Duotone, and a Variax walk into a bar..." https://reverb.com/news/first-listen-fenders-groundbreaking-acoustasonic-hybrid at least it doesn't have autotuners...

I had a drill jig with bushings to drill one base at a time, and a different drill jig to drill 6 saddles as a strip but then you had to cut them off the strip. Had a separate fixture for milling the string ramp (blew up a ton of really small ball-radius end mills). Now for the kicker: I tapped every f'ng thread by hand (didn't have a machine to do that). That's three per saddle, or eighteen per complete bridge, all by hand. Still have saddles in a box in the basement with broken taps sticking out of them. At least that work could be done inside the house, and not in a 50-degree garage in the winter like all the other steps. Glad I only made two dozen bridges. That was more than enough.

Teles are a great mod platform that you can mutate into almost anything with a screwdriver and a chisel lol. I have a quilt-topped alder Tele body with a Clapton profile neck and GFS pickups that were kind of 'meh' so it sat for a couple of years. I found a Duncan quarter-pounder bridge pickup in my parts pile, ordered up the matching neck pickup. and now it's a daily player along with my DGT. My favorite tele is still a pine-body with a huge V neck and Duncan Broadcasters, but the quilt top is pretty close just a different flavor (like Jefferson's vs Woodford lol).

I used to have one just like that in a snakeskin graphic and it was a monster. I don't recall the neck plate but the rest of that looks right to me.

I think when Hamer was a small shop they just bolted up whatever they had in stock that would let them ship product; I owned a graphic Special with a brass nut that looked original and saw several other Hamers with the same style of brass nut. Also the headstock logos (checkerboard/non-checkerboard, Sunburst logo on a Special etc) seemed to be prone to some degree of inconsistency.