Some General Daion Info - Or Two Plus Two = Five!

As time goes by I'm hoping to be able to pull together various bits of information I find to figure out more about the Daion brand, identify more of the guitars and try to figure out when and where the various types were made.

We know that the Daion brand were making guitars in Japan from about 1978 to around 1984 or there abouts. After that it seems that there were still Daion branded guitars coming out of Korea, made up of either left over Japanese Daion components, or Korean parts. This part is somewhat fuzzy so please don't take any of this as fact, it's mere what I have typically found written.

After scouring the interwebs for Daion info, occasionally two separate things link up which then sort of give a bit more of a definite idea about what went on. This following is one of those things.

A few weeks ago there was a Daion for sale here in Australia (see this post http://daionguitarsdownunder/2013/06/daions-on-ebay.html )that was slightly different to the others in a couple of ways.

Firstly the headstock face was painted body colour, and apart from the Daion branding there was no other name written on the headstock like the others I have seen, with either Performer or Rockson MDL.

The second major thing, was from the pics, it appeared as though the body may have been made of some form of ply wood, which was sort of visable through one of the chips in the paint.

See the photos below where you can clearly see two distinct colors of wood which does not look like grain, but a sandwich of different timbers, and the painted headstock. Also take note of the bonded maple fretboard cap on the neck, bullet truss rod, twin string trees and machine heads for further comparison.

So having this odd Daion in the memory bank, made the next thing I found quite interesting. I was browsing the web site http://www.music-trade.co.jp/index.htm and while looking through the various guitars featured found this one, which was very similar in a lot of ways, http://www.music-trade.co.jp/80021224carte.html

In the description was written the following information, with some pics below that:

"Daion Stratocaster

As you may know, Daion is parent company of Yamaki. They had been distributing the Yamaki, Daion and Joodee brand in 70's -80's. I have heard that Yamaki was bankrupted. I don'y know about Daion so much. However, I've check the company name though net, I could not find out.

Daion offered many good quality guitars. I guess this guitar is very cheap range products. Maybe not Japanese made.

The body is plywood. I don't mind so much about the body material. Some of plywood guitars gave us much better tone than solid wood. I don't say this is it. However, I got this as historical guitar, anyhow.

The neck is 1P with maple FB bonded. The fret age treat is not really good. It looks like Korean made Fender Squire Korean guitar"

What I find interesting with these two guitars is the similar painted headstock and Daion logo with no other identification, similar bullet truss rod, twin string tress albeit in slightly different positions, and the in the comments of note are the mention of a "plywood body" and "the neck is 1P (one piece) with maple FB (fret board) bonded", as well as pointing towards it being Korean made and not Japanese.

All of the above features match the one that was for sale a few weeks ago. So is it possible that features like the painted headstock, bonded maple fretboard and plywood body are pointers towards the cheaper Korean built post 1984 Japanese made Daion's?

Like always I'd be happy to hear anyone's thoughts on this subject, and to make sure I haven't put two and two together and ended up with five!