The Guitologist | 1 year ago

On a recent trip to the Dallas Guitar Show I ran across a line of vintage electric guitars I either never knew existed, or had forgotten existed – the Kustom K200 line. I had this video clip left over from my longer video of the event and decided these obscure and rare guitars deserved a bit of a deeper look...

The story of Kustom began in 1964 when Bud Ross began producing solid state amplifiers with the signature “tuck and roll” coverings in Chanute, Kansas. Along about 1966, so the story goes, Bud Ross designed a guitar that was to be manufactured by the Holman-Woodell Guitar Company, which had a factory just down the road in Neodesha, Kansas.

Though very short-lived, last from only 1965-1968, the Holman-Woodell factory is probably best remembered for their wildly-shaped Wurlitzer-branded guitars, which consisted of three models, the Cougar, the Wildcat, and the futuristic George Jetsonesque Gemini. After the Wurlitzer contract fell through in 1967, the Holman factory started producing a line of guitars with the Holman name on them. These were made in very limited quantities, and are almost never seen today. The chief designer for all the Holman-made guitars was a man named Doyle Reading. After the collapse of the Wurlitzer contract, sales declined at Holman, so Reading went to work for Kustom just up the road in Chanute. There he designed the K200 guitar lineup, with its Rickenbacker like cats eye sound hole and body shape. These guitars also seemed very Mosrite inspired with their zero fret and metal nut. The fret markers were unusual also, and depending on the exact model, could contain as many as FOUR dot inlays on the same fret space.

The like the Holman-Woodell guitars before them, the Kustom guitar line was very short-lived, lasting only from 1967 through 1969. The quality is very high, and these were by no stretch of the imagination beginner or budget guitars. Bud Ross himself speculated that as few as 2000-3000 Kustom guitars were ever made in total, while others have estimated it's likely even less than that. So the odds of seeing two Kustom K200 guitars from this era in guitar show booths mere feet from one another is very low, and probably a happy accident that will never happen again.

More reading:
https://kustomguitars.wordpress.com/2015/04/12/kustom-guitars-history/
https://uniqueguitar.blogspot.com/2010/10/kustom-amplifiers-and-kustom-guitars.html
https://www.myrareguitars.com/1968-kustom-k200a-electric-guitar
https://kustom.com/about-us/
https://www.vintageguitar.com/1953/holman-guitars/
https://www.namm.org/library/oral-history/bud-ross

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