Westone guitars have a long standing reputation of incredible bang-for-the-buck. These masterfully crafted guitars from the luthiers of Matsumoku in Japan hold their own against any American instrument of any vintage. Matsumoku produced whole guitars and parts for a laundry list of famous guitar brands, most notably for providing parts and necks to FujiGen, the builder of Fender and Ibanez guitars, as well as building guitars for Epiphone, Washburn, Yamaha, Vox, and Aria throughout the 1980s. Matsumoku guitars were also imported by SLM and rebranded as Electra for many years.
Westone in particular had a habit of building small runs of prototype guitars and selling them through their normal distribution channels. These prototype models offered unique pickup configurations, wiring schemes, or other modifications from the standard Westone catalog. This particular Thunder is believed to be one of these prototype models. Thorough searching online and consultation with Westone collectors has revealed no other examples of a Thunder bass with this particular pickup arrangement. The pickups are stock, the bass shows no indication of ever having been modified.
The helpful folks at the Westone forums lead me to believe that this is a Prototype Thunder II V.3. The Thunder II V3 came out in 1983, this one was a prototype model from 1982. It has a 32" scale length.
The bass is in good overall shape, with some signs of wear. There are a couple small chips in the headstock, some belt-buckle rash and a small dent on the back of the body, and a scrape along the bottom right edge of the body. Practically zero fret wear--you can see where the strings press on the frets, but there is no pitting on the frets and they seem to be perfectly level.
The bass has been professionally set up and has great action and playability. Strings are Ernie Ball Super Slinky and are barely a month old. Includes original Westone hard shell case.
The bass is all-original except for the wiring. Pots, caps, wires, and switches are all original, but the configuration is changed. The factory wiring was a 3-way pickup switch, master volume, and per-pickup tone controls. I did not find this to be very practical, so I reconfigured it: switch is now Series/Parallel, and the pots are wired as a standard J-bass: 2 volumes, 1 tone. Extra original tone cap is included. No wires were cut. I am more than happy to return it to factory wiring if you want, but I do think it is more versatile this way.
It really is a great bass, but I have too many and this one gets the least play.
