Grateful Dead Music Forum

tigerstrat wrote:

Rusty the Scoob wrote:Is it my imagination or is the middle pickup nudged toward the neck a little bit - as if it were the active coil on a middle Super II?

I'm gonna say the neck is nudged towards the middle, to accomodate the 24 fret neck (regular Strat ends at 21, and a 22 fret replacement neck goes right up to neck pup). Could be that the middle is nudged a little towards the bridge as well.

Good point about the neck position. The middle to bridge space looks more strat-like to my naked eye.

strumminsix wrote:

jdsmodulus wrote:Whew..thats an Irwin alright!

Guess or fact?

I don't think there's any way to know absolutely for sure -- without Doug saying so, that is. The owner doesn't represent it as being an Irwin, but it certainly looks like it could be one, and he was curious about it when he showed it to me back in 02 or 03. I'm sure Doug made a number of guitars that are floating around out there. And it's certainly possible that some other luthier made a copy, although it seems unlikely that someone would make a guitar with a vague Strat sort of shape and pickguard and slap an Irwin logo on it. If you're going to copy an Irwin, you would think it would be the Wolf or Tiger guitar.

There's also no way of knowing whether the pickups are original, where the Roland came from, if it had a pickguard on it to start, etc. The history is really unknown. It is interesting that it has the amp knobs that Wolf Jr. had, that's a good clue, as well.

Dunno about the wood, definitely reddish in color ... could be purpleheart (Wolf has that red color on its sides but grain looks different, or walnut)? If it was made around the time of Wolf Jr, that's Peruvian walnut and has kind of a cocobolo grain look to it.

Maybe Lieber could verify the provenance????

The body looks like purpleheart to me.

Maybe this was made around the same time as Wolf Jr.