Rare Vintage 1980 Westone on Ebay

Can any of you seasoned Westie Experts ID this jewel? http://cgi.ebay.com/RARE-VINTAGE-1980-WESTONE-ELECTRIC-GUITAR-W-W-NR-/260664772013?pt=Guitar&hash=item3cb0d4c5ad

The body shape and neckplate point to late Matsumoku production. Not sure what it actually is, though. Someone more well versed in the super strats will be able to tell you.

Nope; I got nothing!! It 'sort-of' looks like a Spectrum XA1230/1330 but the control layout is odd... one for Thorn!!!

I can identify Matsumoku Westones easily, with the SLM ones I have to go through every page of the catalogues, so I don't know offhand what this was originally. It's been altered - apart from the knobs, the tone control isn't original (At least in that position), and isn't fitted centrally in the hole, I suspect that hole was originally for a mini toggle coil tap switch or similar. The finish doesn't look original to me, and seems to have been badly applied, you can see bits of the yellow finish under the stain on the front. In the last picture you can see lines around the doy, halfway along the dark top - no way that's original. It's an August 86 model, but I wouldn't boither trying to figure out exactly what it is when it's been messed about so much.

Yes, I agree it resembles an XA1230, but the edges of the body are much more rounded indicating some heavy sanding. The thing that caught my eye were those 3 push buttons below the vol and tone controls. Could that possibly be an active tone circuit? Just thought it might be a lesser known model, but Thorn is right, it has been heavily modified and furthermore it's gone higher than I expected. Thanks for your responses!

The push buttons are probably just individual on/off switches for the pickups.

Thorn wrote:The push buttons are probably just individual on/off switches for the pickups.

Bingo.

I had an '86 X390DBK guitar that had two of these push-on-push-off buttons for pickup switching. The buttons look the same. I thought it was a prototype because it had some features that I had never seen on another Pantera X390 (rosewood fingerboard, bendmaster deluxe instead of kahler pro, and the buttons). But here is another Westone with these buttons.