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After I got back home a little after 9:00 am on that black Tuesday my first two phone calls I received were from Jol and Frank. Jol had a lot of suggestions and encouragement and Frank ( even though I'm not sure what I'm going to do) offered to do all he could to help me with getting a job. In addition to working with great guys, I had great guys I worked for !!!!

Thank you Frank, Jol, Steve W. and Mike Q.

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All I can say is thank you. Your labors of love will live on in the hands of players around the world. My 3 Hamers are my most prized possessions.

Please consider starting a small company and doing it again. Lil Dawg Amps is a one man show and very successful at producing top quality hand-crafted amps.....you could do the same. But yeah, like all of us , you need a paycheck coming in to feed the fam and simply to survive.

Godspeed and thank you for creating AMAZING guitars!

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I know many of us here would support that endeavour.

Like we supported Hamer by buying used and complaining about their new model prices? Yet the market pays those prices for PRS and Gibsons all day, everyday.

Indeed. With a few exceptions, our expenditures on the brand do not match our enthusiasm for the brand. I include myself in that category.

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I have personally purchased plenty of new and custom ordered Hamers since 1989. I like a good deal as much as anybody, but I'll also save and make room for quality stuff that is exactly what I want as long as it is priced fairly. Hamer was the one company that I was able to do that with the exception of a few years near the end when the pricing stopped making sense (2008-2011). If I hadn't just made a ridiculously large college tuition payment for my son in August, 2012, I would have placed at least one custom order between then and December, as I had priced a few things out from Elduave's list.

Timing isn't always your friend, I guess, but I have supported the brand for years.

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A more likely (and important) scenario would be to enthusiastically support the Hamer guys in whatever endeavor(s) they take on next as much as possible. They have always been the heart and soul of the guitars that mean so much to many of us, and anything we can hope to give back to them should definitely start there.

Well said.

When you get down to it, the name on the headstock means little - it's the quality of the workmanship and the caring of the people doing the work that matter.

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Epiphone was made in New York, but then a protracted strike in 1951 prompted Epi to move to Philadelphia.

Guild was founded in Manhattan in 1952 by Aflred Dronge, music store owner/guitarist and George Mann former Gibson Exec.

Gibson didn't buy Epiphone until 1957. There may have been some migration to Guild at that time, but Guild was five years old by then.

George Mann didn't work for Gibson, he worked for Epiphone. There's even a court case between them around 1951: http://www.leagle.com/decision/1951832279AD553_5678

Maybe it was the strike that resulted in Epiphone employees moving to Guild in Hoboken.

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the pricing stopped making sense (2008-2011)

Why exactly was that the case, in your opinion?

That's the million dollar question. I have a number of ideas, but nothing has been proven/confirmed. The world changed more than most of us realized in 2008, and I think that starting in 2006 or so, things started tapering off from the buying public in general, not just for Hamers, not just for guitars, and for most luxury/discretionary spending in general.

That timing kind of coincided with Kaman's prepping for the ultimate sale to FMIC. They had to have known they were being courted for purchase at least a year or so in advance of the late 2007 transaction close, so would be doing all they could to dress up the numbers. If anybody here was paying attention (I'm sure some of us were), there were often two significant list list price hikes every year through most of the '00s. Not sure if that was Kaman corporate "testing the waters" to push the envelope to see just how much people would take before they stopped buying, some internal vision to quickly move Hamer to become a super-premium boutique brand, or just a natural rising of the pricing tides to go right along with the similar price increases from PRS, Gibson and everybody else back then. When the economy was cruising along at a rapid pace 15 to 10 years ago, everything else was jumping in price, so it would have been totally natural for Hamer/Kaman to do the same thing.

It was most likely all of the above factors to some degree, along with maybe half a dozen more that shaped what ultimately happened. I really tire of everybody trying to pin it on one person or another, or blame FMIC's takeover as killing the brand. There were multiple cracks in the hull that eventually took the ship down, and to try to put the responsibility solely in one place shows a lack of understanding for how businesses work. I analyze the living and dying of businesses on a daily basis, and absent gross mismanagement or a catastrophic event, it is rarely one single person that kills the thing, and it is more likely a myriad of outside factors that combine for the perfect storm.

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What Chris said.....

Plus, a perfect example of another factor happened to me yesterday. I had a guy who was around 30 y.o. Come by yesterday to look at am apartment I have for rent on Long Island/metro NYC area. Relatively intelligent, full-time musician and guitar instructor with a couple hundred students.

We talked a little about guitars and he asked what I play. When I mentioned "Hamer," a huge question mark went off over his head and he said, " Hamer? .....Never heard of that."

THAT was a big nail in the Hamer coffin IMO. After the Hamer heyday of the 80s and early 90s, they lost their identity. They went from virtually every big band having at least one Hamer onstage to the next generation barely knowing the brand....and by the second generation of current years, no one knew the brand. A rather stunning loss of market share over 15 years.

The other end of that was also, of the younger players who HAD heard of Hamer, most thought it was some cheap, import brand.

IMO...Paul Reed Smith picked up where Hamer dropped the ball and out-Hamered Hamer since that time.

They are currently where Hamer should be in market share, had the brand been continued to be marketed right.

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For what it's worth - anytime Jol and I have discussed Hamer, I am left feeling he didn't necessarily appreciate Hamer as a larger-scale company. He has noted numerous times that he prefers the more initimate appeal that a smaller outfit allows. His perspective seems to run anathema to throttling a company forward to the levels that PRS is currently making guitars.

Although he was less influential in the latter years he was with Hamer, and with the assumption this was his perspective during that time, I can't help but to think that impacted the direction and size of the Hamer brand...

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a few years near the end when the pricing stopped making sense (2008-2011).

That's exactly when the pricing STARTED to make sense. Huber, PRS, DeTempe and others were getting it and as far as I can tell none of them had about twenty firsts in the market place. The problem was the existing customers were use to cheap prices and they failed to get new upscale customers. Remember BMW used to just be another car brand before the mid 1980s, they wrote the book on how go upscale after the market views you as mid market.

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a few years near the end when the pricing stopped making sense (2008-2011).

That's exactly when the pricing STARTED to make sense. Huber, PRS, DeTempe and others were getting it and as far as I can tell none of them had about twenty firsts in the market place. The problem was the existing customers were use to cheap prices and they failed to get new upscale customers. Remember BMW used to just be another car brand before the mid 1980s, they wrote the book on how go upscale after the market views you as mid market.

Maybe stopped making sense to their established customer base and the position they had developed in the marketplace. I totally get what they were trying to do, but it didn't work without the other legs of the stool: Endorser Visibility and robust marketing.

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006_zpsd90da5b0.jpg

Mike Shishkov should have been running the marketing!!! Pics like this make a lot of people salivate...

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For what it's worth - anytime Jol and I have discussed Hamer, I am left feeling he didn't necessarily appreciate Hamer as a larger-scale company. He has noted numerous times that he prefers the more initimate appeal that a smaller outfit allows. His perspective seems to run anathema to throttling a company forward to the levels that PRS is currently making guitars.

Although he was less influential in the latter years he was with Hamer, and with the assumption this was his perspective during that time, I can't help but to think that impacted the direction and size of the Hamer brand...

Which makes sense, given he treated the company like an uber-boutique brand and has always had that "air" about him.

Heck, I recently told someone about my recent score and he gave me the same confused look that someone mentioned earlier. The brand had virtually disappeared from people's radars 15+ years ago, at least. I think that move to make Hamer boutiquey killed it. That's not to say what was created wasn't extraordinary. It was until the end. But I think back to my guys in Judas Priest slinging Hamers to where things are today and it's night and day. Of course, as Chris said, it was a multitude of things over the years. But I think that played a big role.

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BTW.....what is the last official Hamer to be churned out...and what is the last official SN# ?

You guys should get together one night and just bang out something totally bizarre and stamp it SN#666666 with a gold headstock plaque that says "The Last Hamer" and let HFC raffle it off

with the funds to go to some charity of the Hamer staff's choice.

....maybe a copy of SN#0000 to take it full circle.

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A couple of months ago, after one of the New Hartford guys posted a picture if a completed unsold Newport in storage (I think it was a Newport), I contacted somebody at Willcutt, I asked if they would contact New Hartford/Fender and see if there were indeed completed Hamers in storage. He sounded excited by the prospect and told me that Wilcutt would buy anything available.. He made the call on one of the snowstorm days and the facility was closed. He said he'd get back to me but he never did. Occassionally I visit Willcutt's website to see if there are any Hamers in the "New Arrivals" section, but none have been posted.

I image that some of the other former Hamer dealers could make the same call. But, now, who would they call? And where, if there are any, are they stored?

Kim would know and will be around through May.

I spoke with Kim about that Newport - it was a brand new, custom Newport and it is since gone. He said it was the last Newport model (of any type) Hamer made. I asked him to look around for any other Hamer's hiding around there and he told me he was confident that Newport was the last new Hamer left in their warehouse.

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A couple of months ago, after one of the New Hartford guys posted a picture if a completed unsold Newport in storage (I think it was a Newport), I contacted somebody at Willcutt, I asked if they would contact New Hartford/Fender and see if there were indeed completed Hamers in storage. He sounded excited by the prospect and told me that Wilcutt would buy anything available.. He made the call on one of the snowstorm days and the facility was closed. He said he'd get back to me but he never did. Occassionally I visit Willcutt's website to see if there are any Hamers in the "New Arrivals" section, but none have been posted.

I image that some of the other former Hamer dealers could make the same call. But, now, who would they call? And where, if there are any, are they stored?

Kim would know and will be around through May.

I spoke with Kim about that Newport - it was a brand new, custom Newport and it is since gone. He said it was the last Newport model (of any type) Hamer made. I asked him to look around for any other Hamer's hiding around there and he told me he was confident that Newport was the last new Hamer left in their warehouse.

Just to clarify......the leftover Hamers I was referring to were in various stages of completion. They were not completed guitars. They are in the warehouse with other misc things. I would guess there was a dozen of them with finish sprayed on them.
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It is rare for people to know what Hamer is, outside of the imports. "You mean HaMMer?"

No one in my age range knows the real thing.

I became infatuated with them when a fellow guitarist in another high school band had a black special. Looked, sounded, played awesome. If I remember correctly, he was bitter it wasn't the Gibson he wanted, but still enjoyed it. That was also around the time No Doubt came along, and Tom Dumont rocked his wicked Standards.

Everyone seems to like them when they play them, but when it's time to buy, its always Fender this, Gibson that, PRS the other thing.

So much more guitar for the money, even at the list prices. Preaching to the choir here, I know, but its that brand recognition that lacked.

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