Details about the Buick

Now that I have one of these guitars in my hands, let us explore some of the finer points that are relevant to guitar players.

First and foremost, the guitar is a solidbody, obviously. It's the standard 1.75" thick, and the body wood is Mahogany (quite possibly Honduran or some other tropical variety). Its neck is maple and rosewood. The body is a lot smaller than the photos make it look. It's actually quite compact.

I'm not usually a fan of gloss finish on necks (they tend to slow me down), but this one doesn't seem to have that effect. The headstock runs straight with the neck, unlike the slight tilt-back of later specimens. String trees hold the first four strings in place. Note the matte black washer on the 2nd string tuning machine. This points to either some sort of mod in its life or a jumbled assembly with spare parts.

Vintage Schaller tuning machines, labeled "Made in W. Germany". A Cold War relic! This was probably one of the most exciting things to find on this guitar.

From what I've been able to gather, the Motherbuckers were wound to a DC resistance of at least 4.3K-ohms per coil, which puts the three together at somewhere around 13K. This is fairly hot, especially for its time, though the sound it produces is still very clear and rich in harmonics--very little mud, if any. The output drops like a marble in the sink when coils are switched out of phase due to their proximity, though the sounds produced could still be usable in some context.

The neck screws are unplated brass, I can tell from the tarnishing. But is this neckplate brass or gold? Who knows? Just another finger pointing towards "thrown together"--it is a prototype after all. That control cavity plate is chrome. The wiring inside is kinda rat's nest looking, but, again, prototype.

These frets still have plenty of life in them. The action is extremely low, which makes this guitar unbelievably easy to play.  The 5th-string-offset inlays were JBP's signature touch at the time.

All in all it's a fantastic instrument, built like a tank and unprecedentedly elegant. The perfect new wave guitar, which is what it was made for after all. The only complaint I really have is the fact that the single pickup doesn't give you the same timbral range you can get with a guitar with 2 or 3 pickups spaced from body to neck. But it's a detail I'm more than willing to overlook to focus on the fact that I have this thing at all. 11/10, would bust down the doors of some current guitar company and demand they put it back in production.