Click on "Show More" above to see all 24 of the pictures in this gallery

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A very valuable and highly collectable pre-factory Custom 24 with a fire-like flamed Maple top and natural binding.  Be sure to enlarge all 24 of the photos in the gallery.  The color is a rich Tobacco Burst finish as noted in the pickup cavity.  There's nothing red about this guitar.  It has the original PRS stamped "T" & "B" pickups, only issued to 1985-1987 guitars.  There were only about 3500 guitars made in those first three years at the Viginia Ave. shop.  Of those 40 year old instruments how many are still in circulation?  Of those remaining guitars, how many of them have had their pickups replaced and/or lost? 

 

The pickups are not the only unique aspect of these 1985-1987 PRS.  The very first version of these Customs in those first three years had a unique pickup configuration to their 5-way rotary switches.  The coil combinations included the closest emulation of a Stratocaster tone in position #7 that you'll find on any PRS and a VERY Prominent cocked-wah tone in position #9 that you won't find on-board any other guitar.  Then of course, there is the Sweet Switch.  The original "T" & "B" pickups went away after 1987.  The Sweet Switch went away in 1992.  The blue wafer rotary remained until 1994, but was never again wired to the same coil combinations as the original PRS guitars were through 1987.  This 1987 guitar has ALL of those original appointments. 

 

These 1985-1987 PRS guitars are in a league of their own, even among other pre-factory (1988-1994) PRS Guitars.  The sequential serial number of this guitar is under 3,500.  Serial numbers of the Core PRS guitars leaving the factory today are approaching a half-million, which means this guitar is in the top 0.07% of all PRS core Customs ever made.  Truly a piece of PRS history and a firey beauty as well. 

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The guitar is an extremely clean piece built by the early craftsmen at PRS.  It will build value for as long as you own it. There is some shallow grooving of the frets as customary for a guitar that has been played as it should be.  The action is excellent and the frets have plenty of life in them.  There is one nick in the back edge near the strap button, which you can see just below the glare in the picture of the back.  I'll send a blank plate for the control cavity.  I don't know who "Bill Gear" is.  The person that I bought the guitar from didn't know either.  In the picture of serial number, you can see a little whitening of the clear coat on the rear headstock tips.  That is it for cosmetics.  The top, back, sides edges, neck and headstock are otherwise completely nick, dent and scratch free, earning it a 9.6 out of 10 cosmetic rating.  Very hard to find a (near) 40 year old vintage PRS guitar in this condition.  Collectable, yet played just enough to be "playable" too.

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These vintage pre-factory PRS guitars are an investment.  You'll ALWAYS have the option to re-sell it for as much or more than you paid.  This guitar was hand made by small group of craftsmen who were on a mission to build a world class guitar company.  No one can deny that they succeeded.  The outstanding quality of these pre-factory PRS guitars that they produced in the first ten years at the Virginia Avenue shop, is the foundation on which the PRS factory was built and their global brand was launched. 

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A word on Pre-Factory PRS Guitars and Factory built PRS Guitars

 

The new core guitars built in the factory are fabulous instruments.  Rock solid and perfect.  Perhaps too perfect.  I look at it as the result of feeding a blank of wood into a machine at the front end of a production line and taking a very fine guitar out of a different machine at the end of that line.  Over the years, every single step of the build that can be automated, has been automated.  The virtual absence of a craftsman’s hands throughout the build process somehow makes them feel like identical coins stamped out of a machine.  Very, very fine coins, Yes!  Yet still, a sterile product of hyper automation compared to the guitars from the Virginia Ave. shop made by the original team of craftsmen before 1995.

 

Before the factory opened in 1995 the PRS team built approximately 30,000 guitars in a warehouse shop over the ten years prior (~20KCustoms and ~10K CE-24’s).  The Second Tier (S2), Third Teir (SE) instruments were not even remotely on their radar.  The fork in the road that started PRS down a path to flooding the market with cheaper models started seven years after the factory opened with the introduction of the Santana III.  The S2 and SE lines that followed, have produced over 650,000 of these Second/Third Teir guitars, in addition to the half-million cores built since 1985.  The USA PRS factory now produces over 25,000 core guitars each year, every year.  The guitar in this listing is from the first 3,500 PRS ever made 

 

Here is an overview of the permanent design changes that took place for the Custom 24 and CE-24 model when mass production began at the factory in 1995.

 

• The neck heel was extended, impeding access to the upper frets

• The solid block Mil-Com tremolo bridge was redesigned to a five-piece assembled unit

• The mechanical rotary (3 unique versions in the first 10 years) was replaced by a switch which routes the pickup signal through a Printed Circuit card 

• The small headstock decal that identifies the guitar as a vintage original was abandon for a larger, polished gold decal

• The individual character of each instrument, was homogenized away in favor of sterile, mass production protocols

 

Why These Things Matter:

 

I’ve bought, sold, owned and gigged over 300 hundred PRS guitars throughout the past 25 years.  The original, Pre-Factory, mechanical blue wafer rotary switch provided direct connection between the vintage pickups and the output jack.  All guitars that came after 1995 have newly designed rotaries, which utilize a printed circuit board to channel the pickup’s signals. Where there were three versions of the original rotary which provided unique pickup coil combinations, all rotaries after 1995 are coil-configured exactly the same.  The circuitry of the printed circuit rotaries also suppress the raw signal from the pickups subtly, in a way that the original mechanical switches do not.

 

I’ll never understand the neck heel change.  In 2011 PRS created a Guitar Center “Throwback 1985” run of Custom 24’s.  The model was not true to spec in several key aspects, while the neck heel was a passable version of the original short heel contour.  Why can’t they put a short heel on all of them? 

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The one-piece Mil-Com bridge is said to be more resonant.  I don’t know if anyone could tell the difference, but it is unique to the pre-factory guitars, it does weigh more than the assembled bridges and was probably re-designed just to cut costs. 

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The headstock decal change is sort-of a good thing.  Like the short neck heel, the small signature decal is an immediately recognizable indication that a PRS guitar was made between 1985 and 1994 in the Virginia Ave shop, with a considerably higher level of hands-on, personal craftsmanship in the build. 

 

 

A Word About Vintage Instruments:

 

You can tell when you have a true vintage instrument in your hands.  The resonance of the wood which has aged naturally for decades simply can NOT be duplicated in a new instrument. The Retro, Relic, Custom Shop, Re-Issue, Private Stock, Murphy Lab, Master Built, Throw-Back, etc. guitars can all be built to their original spec, but will never replicate natural aging of the wood through the passage of time.  This is a vintage PRS guitar in excellent condition, which is ready for you to honestly, respectfully and authentically “relic” as you make it your own.  All at less than the cost of a new core Custom that will sell for half what you paid for it, four years from now.  If you’re casually looking here out of curiosity, while thinking more seriously about buying your sixth SE in a different color, your third S2 or a new CE-24, give some thought and consideration to selling some of what you’ve already got to buy a vintage Core PRS instead. Pre-Factory PRS guitars are still affordable and will always increase in value, for as long as you own, play and hold them.     

 

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Please be sure to take a moment and click here to look at my ABOUT page or access it from the top menu bar.  I encourage even the smallest of questions so always feel free to e-mail me any time.  Over 140 of my online feedback ratings are from PRS guitar sales.

 

This guitar is also listed on sites with a starting price of $350 more than I'm asking here on my site, just to put a dent in the seller fees they would charge me for a transaction there. 

 

Why pay more than you have to?  Check my feedback and buy it here.  It may be gone soon.  Send me an e-mail and we'll talk.  

 

If you've come to this page directly through an organic Google search, click this link to see a list of all the guitars I currently have for sale before leaving this page.

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$5400.00 Includes Ground shipping to the lower 48

 

I recently heard someone a lot smarter than I am say: 

"Life is short..... Buy the guitar".

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