I thought it was more 95'ish when Glen started the site. When I first joined I was a few years behind everybody else, and I'm pretty sure that was in 97'. Soon after I bought the JS5 I dove deep, Butch Slusher told me about the 10th, and I had to order one of those for the collection [it was either that or one of the JS3's Ed Roman had for $2500. I figured I could always buy one of those later, but they were only going to make a claimed 150 of the Chromes!! How little did I know at the time?!], through my little local dealer at a very steep discount, so that was post NAMM 98'. Before it came in I had sold 5 or 6 of them as a dealer, selling everything thru Jemsite classified and a spam email list of several thousand I had started saving of anybody buying, selling, or even asking about good Ibanez guitars. You'd be surprised how many guitars I sold on that list, or how many of them are still repeat customers and friends to this day. I finally just had to start making a web page, that was in 2000.
To ramble on, that JS10th, when it came in 14 months later, had horrible neck alignment, and at the time I was certainly no master tech, and wasn't going to risk pulling the neck on that chrome finish to figure it out, I called Bansalem, 40 miles away, and they told me to bring it up, they'll give me the tour! Jim Donahue met me at the door, and an hour later after a full walk thru the warehouse, the boardroom collection display, and an amazing look thru a scrapbook in his office of everything from the original outline drawing of a Radius with the JS changes drafted over it, and the angle to which JD would have to bend Joe's bars traced to one side, to amazing pictures, and of course, the Donnie with plate #000001 that hung over his desk!! [drool], I left with a full roll of film shot.
Call 2 weeks later, it's done, come pick it up. Great, JD meets me at the door, hands me the case, I open, and the whole lower half of the front was a haze of 7 billion uber fine scratches. I point it out with a WTF?!!!! and was explained that a string had put a light scratch in it and he had to polish it out, the polish creating the haze that was far worse than any scratch would have been. I was then told that if I didn't want it, no problem, he'd take it back and sell it to somebody else, they couldn't get any more. My first strong arm by HUSA! But started a long relationship with JD where he put up with literal thousands of emails of questions and curiosities, and information I'd get him to get from japan, etc. JD is where my real Ibanez education came from. The man was there in the middle of everything going on at the time.
I took it home, I immediately started posting adds to trade it for any JS2, 3, 4, or 5 [my usual add 3 of us early hunters just saturated the internet with as often as humans could tolerate], and one of the other hunters write within an hour, just plucked a JS3 from a closet, had also just gotten HIS new JS10th order, and was so in love with it he wanted another to use as a player, and mine was perfect for that. We did a dead even trade. After I got it, and looked at it with pictures that weren't upside down and sideways, I recognized it, It was the one on the left in this picture.
[image]http://ibanezrules.com/images/jemsite/ER2JS3.jpg[/image]
why isn't the image tag working??
If you recognize, that was Romans original picture of the 2 Donnies I could have bought when I ordered the JS10th instead. How crazy is that? Almost every one of those JS buys/trades has an interesting story attached to it!!