Well, I am HAPPY to say that most customer orders for the Gaskell HYBRID Series are in! I have preliminarily inspected these guitars and apart from the factory putting on right handed knobs (never would have lost that bet!) they are good. We have the Custom Shop work to do on them next and I will be contacting those of you who are not in Australia and have international shipping costs still to work out in the next week or two.
I am quite pleased with these guitars. Having made Custom guitars fully in-house here in Australia, using the best of the best, I do need to, in my own mind, "lower expectations" in some areas. Mass produced and Custom Shop are very different operations. A $1000 guitar is not a $5000 guitar.
I have used several factories to make this current run and all are excellent for the price point. I pay a third more for each guitar than any other brand that buys in quantity for the privilege of doing custom orders on a small scale. Factories don't like that. In fact, in the process of finding factories that would make left handed Gaskells, most simply said "no." Lefty guitarists are 1 in 200 and factory manufacturing is all about quantity and output. That's another thing. I had to wait a long time for these. Lefty orders are NOT their priority. I am somewhat at their mercy.
Thank you for your patience.I didn't plan on doing this initially but I also had a few Firestarters built for "stock." I have two very beautiful transparent wine guitars with gold hardware - absolutely gorgeous, and one is a wine-burst with chrome hardware. Also transparent so you can still see the very nice mahogany. Also a "spare" Pelham Blue Firestarter, a blue Allrounder FR (Floyd Rose), and a Headless in Signal Red.
All guitars are very light weight which means the wood is high quality. No guitar is over 3kg. I will be in touch with you all in the next few days.
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