I understand that. But in reading this thread completely, there are stories of the entire production line being shut down.
On page 2 of this thread, JTE from central Illinois said :
" I was a Fender dealer from 1977 through 1988. The huge change in quality was in 1982 after Bill Schultz was hired by CBS to take over direction of the Fender division of Fender/Rogers/Rhodes. He hired a bunch of people he'd worked with at Yamaha (the ones who came up with the BB 1200 bass and the SG-2000 "Carlos Santana" guitar among other things) as well as other respected industry folks (Roger Balmer came over from Music Man, and they eventually got Norlin's head of artist relations, Bruce Bolen, on board too).
They shut down production and taught the employees how to make and more importantly INSPECT products. They stopped using such green wood, and they took the time to do things right. They also knew they had to make some big changes to get the buying public's attention drawn to what Fender was making. That's why the Vintage Series started. They introduced the Vintage '52 Telecaster guitar around 1980. It was, like all the Vintage Series, not based on a specific instrument, but on the general plan of what a guitar from the era would have been like new. Cosmetically there are some issues (e.g. the 12th fret dots are not in the same location that the originals were), but the inherent design and quality was there. But that inmprovement was also made on all the production guitars. A stock 1981 Stratocaster is generally a much better instrument than the same model from 1979.
CBS was still divesting themselves of non-communication companies so they were shopping Fender to other companies in the early '80s. Schultz headed up a group of investors including "a prominent musician" which bought the company's name, trademarks, WIP, etc. from CBS in 1985. They did NOT get any real estate so they had to build a new factory. Most of the Fenders sold in 1985 were Japanese imports.
BTW, we finally got our first Vintage Series instruments (except for our first '52 Telecaster which had come pretty quickly after the initial NAMM show orders) in April 1983. Hardly any dealers got any Vintage Series stuff before then, but there were the dealer samples and a few very large stores got a small sampling of the VS stuff. But in April 1983 Fender essentially cleaned up just about all their back-orders and shipped a lot of stuff all at once. My store got 25 new Fenders in one day- and it was a small store that only had about 75-100 instruments on the walls all together!
Included in that intial back-order clearing was a '57 Strat ('burst), a '62 Strat (also 'burst), another '52 Tele (transparent of course), a '57 P bass ('burst), a '62 Jazz (black), and this Lake Placid Blue '62 Precsion beauty..."
So was curious if anyone can add anything to this?
This is so cool!
Thanks !
