Recently picked up a beautiful Bluesbird off of Craigslist for $1100. Mine is Model #350-6400 with Serial # CL001275. It is a natural finish with after market installed bigsby. I am thinking it is 1998 or before?? Westerly.
If I am reading this right, is this saying there we only 853 of these made?
Welcome aboard jiagap!
Maybe I'm not understanding the question re quantity made, do you mean
in Natural?
Otherwise, yours is already number 1275, and our member Hans Moust most likely knows how many were made by the time Westerly closed in 2001, without even taking into account the Corona-builts from '01- '03 I think it was..
Oh, wait a minute, NOW I get it:
No, that "853" is the finish color(and case type) code, it would be the last 3 digits a dealer would insert after "350-6400-" when ordering from the factory, to specify what color/case he wanted.
So the complete "SKU" for your guitar would be "350-6400-
821" for Natural.
That list is for all the
standard colors Guild offered on the model, no extra charge, no extra turnaround time, but they
were extremely flexible about accepting orders for "non-standard" finish colors, or even just deciding to do it themselves.
It's been the source of some uncertainty about whether a given guitar might actually be a AAA even though it's not one of the standard AAA colors, because the guitars don't actually get marked with the SKU, it only ever showed on the dealer's invoice and maybe their "hang tag" so it got rung up correctly at the register.
See the 2001 price list, note Bluesbird AAA's had a limited range of only 3 standard colors (they're displaced to the top of the next column on that list):
http://www.westerlyguildguitars.com/files/Guild2001.pdf
Way down at the bottom you can see the list of all the "Standard" colors, they just didn't offer all of 'em on all models as standard.
And note that first digit "8" actually indicates that Bluesbirds came with deluxe cases.
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