1981 DAION THE 80-12 HERITAGE 12 Strings with B.Band Pre and Pickup - Handcraft - Serial Number 101582 Ex+ cond. Code AC137

Beautiful and very well made12 string guitar up for grabs. This model was only made for one year in 1980. It has a brass nut and brass bridge. Plays as well or better than any Martin, Taylor, or Gibson ! and for good reason these are absolutely great guitars. Considering their upward market trend, too, other people are figuring that out.
The tone of this guitar exceeds its materials, it has the bright, jangly sparkle and definition you'd expect but also a nice, creamy, lower-mids accent. This makes it really nice for that sort of lower-string thumping that's so tasty on a 12-string. Straight Neck with  good frets, low axion, truss rod works well No break or repair. Comes with a hard case

The complex story of Yamaki guitars is entwined with the histories of a number of other Japanese companies. In the late 1940s, brothers Yasuyuki and Kazuyuki Teradaira started working for Tatsuno Mokko, an instrument-building firm that later split into two different companies, one of which was called Hayashi Gakki. In 1954 Hayashi Gakki was bought out by Zenon, a large music distributor. In 1962 Yasuyuki left Zenon to start an instrument distributor he called Daion, which means “big sound” in Japanese. In 1967 Kazuyuki left Zenon to produce classical guitars under the name Yamaki, an auspicious Japanese word meaning “happy trees on the mountain.” By the early 1970s, Kazuyuki expanded the Yamaki line to include a large number of steel-string guitars, many of which were based on C.F. Martin and Co.’s designs and were distributed exclusively through Daion. Along with Yamaki guitars, Daion sold instruments from Shinano, Mitsura Tamura, Chaki, and Hamox, some of which were built by Yamaki at various times, and Harptone guitars, which they imported from the US.

Sometime in the late 1960s, Daion began exporting Yamaki guitars to America, where they were well received. By the early 1980s, however, Daion felt that the Yamaki Martin-style guitars were getting lost among similar instruments from other Japanese builders like Takamine, Yasuma, and C.F. Mountain, so they redesigned the entire acoustic line and started building acoustic-electrics and solid-body electrics as well as oddities like double-neck acoustics. They dropped the Yamaki name and rebranded their instruments as Daion guitars. Daion began an extensive advertising campaign to introduce the new line around 1982, but this was a time when musicians were more interested in the new MIDI-equipped synthesizers than in guitars. In 1984 Daion stopped importing guitars to America and soon went out of business. Yamaki, on the other hand, survived the downturn of the 1980s and now makes parts for other Japanese guitar companies."