Unusual Ovation Deacon Guitar

Regular readers will know that I am a big fan of Ovation's solid body electric guitars from the 1970s, especially the Breadwinner and Deacon models.

I did a double-take when I first saw this rather unusual-looking Ovation Deacon on eBay; I've not seen one quite like it before. I suspect that the neck and neck plate on the back of the body are the only actual Ovation parts. The neck with its white binding and double diamond inlays would appear to be accurate, but the body is wrong for a genuine Deacon as it has obviously not been routed for pickups and electronics mounted on a scratchplate. The pickups are not Ovations, the bridge is a Gibson style Tunomatic and the control layout is not correct. It doesn't appear to have the active electronics that a genuine Deacon or Breadwinner would have.

Whoever put this guitar together has done an excellent job as the body shape and the forearm and belly contouring look to be absolutely spot-on, whilst the colouring of the wood matches the neck very nicely. The effect is that it looks like it should be original, but there are too many un-Ovation things going on here for this to be the case.