cornjulio

Stunning!!! I believe it's a natural maple top? So cool. Still remember a late (2006?) hamer standard in a natural that looked just gorgeous.

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

Happy Easter! A somewhat later reply as i got overly excited by the 4digit V in the other thread. I hope we'll ge to see more of it (I'm not buying). Here's a shot from the rehearsal room with an orange rocker 30 as a backdrop and the 1980 opaque blue matching headstock special.

I like this one better, 3.5k in Italy: https://reverb.com/item/93571703-hamer-special-1981-custom-black-and-white-graphics-video (no afiliation) Still have mine :-)

😉

Aye, I guess I never really paid attention to this. So the individual saddles on the 81 are about 1mm thinner/ narrower, the total for the six saddles is a difference of 6 mm between the 1978 (wider) and the 1981 (narrower). So maybe that's why the 1st and 6th string are closer to the fretboard edge on the 78. But the width of the strings at the bridge pick up on the 1978 (roughly 53 mm) is pretty much what I have on my 2022 Nik Huber too. The special comes in at about 47 mm.

So... I have a 78 Sunburst with a sustain block and two Specials (1980/1981) and my Shishkov with sustain blocks. The spacing on the 78 in between the strings is much wider, to the point where you notice that the high and low E strings are off center to the poles of the bridge pick up and it also seems to mean that both E strings are closer to the edge on the fretboard than on the Specials/ the Shishkov. Why is that? The string / pole correnspondence is much better with the later sustain blocks but I get the feeling the extra space on the 1978 comes in handy when picking strings (I feel less clumsy). The difference between the width of all six strings on the 78 (wider) and the 81 (narrower) ist almost 5mm altogether.

Are you looking for a Sunburst yourself? pm'd ya.

I sent you an mp3 of a new track. All the best for 2026!

Keep hearing good things about them. I would really like to try one but they are quite pricey IMO.

Two in 2025, to my surprise...wasn't palnned at all. A 1978 Sunburst and a 1980 Special, both in very good condition (the Sunburst had changed tuners at some point). They are the oldest guitars I have now. Everything Fender form the 1960s long gone and I don't think I will ever be able to afford one buying again (love the 1960s Jaguars with matching headstocks).

The idea for the inlays is based on a questionable translation of my German last name into English, supposedly something like "evil river". I made line drawings for fish skeletons and the head of a cat (simplyfied) and Mike tunred them into MoP inlays. The the fretboard is the river, and the cat (frets 11-13) is the predator that has eaten the fish. It kind of went with the curly maple top, that has some lines looking like a wavy extension/ shadow of the strings around the sustain block area. A few years later I followed up on this idea of drawing the inlays with a Nik Huber (which has bone inlays).

Mike's interpretation of a V, the Shishkov V80. We talked a lot about the details, the headstock was entirely his design. He used a leftover part from the maple top to create a matching headstock.

cool!!!