Chris, let me give you a little pre-National/Scheerhorn pricing history. And I paid less than you did in about 1976 for my pre-war, early 1930s Dobro which I still have.
I was at the the Father's Day Bluegrass Festival in Grass Valley in the early '90s (speaking of Kathy Barwick, she's been a regular there) and it was my first time meeting Jerry Douglas. He didn't have his legendary RQ Jones with him, he was playing a new Scheerhorn and it was a thing of beauty. It was either his first or second 'horn, and "I felt lust in my heart." He gave me Tim's contact info in Michigan. Tim sent me a price list with a couple photos that I still have buried around here somewhere. I recall the base price was around $1800. Might as well been have been $18,000 because as a partner in my own business in the Monterey area struggling to keep its head above water with a wife and three little kids at home, an $1800 dobro wasn't in the cards.
Tim inched up the price over the years until around 2000 or so he was getting $3000 for his guitars. But he couldn't keep up with the demand and the waiting list grew longer and longer. By the time I was actually ahead of the game financially (for several years anyway), the price had gone up to $5000 I believe in late 2003, and beyond the price itself there was a wait time of about 3 1/2 years. I didn't want to wait that long and played Todd Clinesmith's guitars at the nearby Healdsburg Guitar Festival, loved them, and he had one ready for me nine months later and I met him at the festival in Grass Valley to pick up the guitar in June 2004.
Later Tim raised the base price to $6000 and announced he was closing the waiting list because he wanted to slow down. He was building 40 or so guitars per year as a one man operation.
He could raise the prices and people who desired Scheerhorns didn't bat an eyelash, they jumped on board. Because the deal is this - folks would own these things for a bit then put them up for sale and get a price that was more than they paid for them. Very unusual in the guitar world, since we're talking about modern instruments, not something like a vintage Martin, Gibson, or Fender.
When Tim decided to cut back on building, he announced that he would be building guitars that were his own personal creations without input from the customer, and he would call this "the wish list." To get on this list the price would start at $10,200. If your number came up on the list you could take it or leave it on his latest creations. He's backed off on just making strictly his own wild creations and has worked with customers who want certain wood combos, etc.
I think he's making a dozen or so of these a year now, don't know for sure. But he's still selling them. Likely very few are going to pro dobro players. And, some folks have been putting up these wish list guitars for sale, but it seems this time around they're not getting what they paid for them in the examples I've seen. That jump from six grand to $10.2K was a major, major leap.
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