Hi, I'm new here and I was the guy who painted the original Whackmaster for Ted back in the late eighties.
Ted sent the shop a Polaroid photo of a factory custom Ford Bronco that had a zebra stripe paint job and had asked that we recreate the motif on his latest custom to come through the shop dusty belly and all..(can't remember if it was one of the new semi hollow bodies or not as they were a hot ticket right after we got the inverted pin router) Anyhow we were told to study the photo and prepare to shoot it. I actually studied some Zebra photos too and was surprised how non uniform their stripes were as compared to big cats.
The other finisher at the time was Tim McClaeb and he was first to tape and shoot it. I think he shot it a few times and it proved to be harder than the guys thought to shoot so it was given to me to shoot. I taped and shot it twice and didn't like those two attempts but the third time I liked what I saw and so did Tim and Geoff Jacobsen, who was finish dept. Manager at the time. Tim and I had taken over for Mark Wadsworth and "Stormin" Norman Boston as the company's finishers, They had both taken on jobs in the woodshop. The Nuge apparently liked the guitar enough to order a dozen EG's painted the same pattern and serialized to sell in his bow hunting catalog and Tim and I split the work on those. We got a great Christmas card from Ted that year that had a pic of him with bow in hand, and his foot on a man in red with an arrow sticking out of him, very camp and pretty damn funny. I left in late '89 but boy I loved working there, It was a small crew in the beginning (less than 20) but there were around 60 when I left and growing rapidly. Paul really gave a crap and that was most impressive. We were all like family quite literally.