"Details, always details!"
How would you define "massive demand"? Once again my friend, it's all in the volume. (if you'll pardon the pun)
A custom logo or grill cloth pattern can only be ordered in quantity. Knowing Yorkville as I do if they couldn't justify buying by the thousands or by the kilometre they wouldn't bother. To order a 100 or so logos to satisfy the hobby restoration market would not seem to be good business. The potential profit even with a huge markup would seem like micenuts to Yorkville.
As for support for the older amps, how much support do you find for schematics at Fender's modern site? Look for yourself and you'll see that it's worse than Traynor.
Lots of guys are looking for Traynor knobs and lament how Yorkville can't help them. There are reasons for this. When Pete first made his amps he chose a catalogue knob he could easily buy cheap from a number of vendors. Today, NOBODY makes that knob! That's why we can't find them. What was Yorkville/Traynor supposed to do? Lay in 10,000 extra knobs and keep them in stock as replacements for 40 years? Especially when 40 years ago how would you know that your amps would BECOME collector pieces? Traynor didn't know for sure if his next batch would even sell.
There's also some unspoken "dirty laundry" in the Traynor history that you won't find in any official FAQ - certainly not the one on the Yorkville site. Pete and Yorkville were a good marriage for some years. He was the quintessential mad scientist of rock and roll! He truly wanted to make great and wonderful amps that would please players everywhere.
As the company grew it seemed that although no one wore a tie perhaps they should have. It was more and more run by "suits" who had a totally different vision than Pete. They saw their money in PA and sound reinforcement, in taking on the Gibson master distributor role for Canada, in (gasp!) solid state amps 'cuz they were cheaper to make with more profit margin.
To make a short story long, in the 80's Pete finally bailed. He retired into the country and wanted nothing more to do with "business". Many strongly suspect that not only did he not get the respect he deserved from the company built on his back but he didn't get nearly as much money as he deserved either. We'll likely never know. Pete's too much of a gentleman to talk about it. Still, it's no secret that he was NOT happy!
It must have been a ballbreaker to get turned down for budget for a new solid state bass amp design and then watch Sunn or Acoustic come out with the same damn thing.
When Pete left it seems Yorkville just totally abandoned its tube amp line and any parts left in inventory. It was about 15 years before there was a new champion in engineering and some support from marketing who were following the Ebay demand for the old amps and we saw the birth of the YCV series. I had a bet for a few beer with one of their salesmen. Their first production run was for 500 units and I bet they would sell out in a few months. I was right and he was wrong. They had to do a second run right away! Never did get my beer, as I recall.
So my point is that there are practical reasons why companies don't support their legacy products. If we want a logo it might be more successful to talk to people like Antique Radio. They've got repros of Fender, Marshall and other major names for faceplates and stuff. They're based on lower volume stuff and might see an opportunity to add old Traynor logos or cloth to the mix.
Maybe if Pete had stayed...
:food-smiley-004:
As for logos, you can order 3d printer replicas or just buy a 3d printer and make your own. Off the top of my head I own at least a half dozen different Traynor logos, ranging from the 60's plastic 'rayno's', 1970 flat metal painted parallelogram, 70's plastic parallelogram, 80's TS series rectangle, cast aluminum script style to modern plastic.
May as well expect GM to stock Cadillac logos from 1910 to the 1980's, just in case someone wants one 1/2 century plus later.
Manufacturers buy by the case lot for things like logos, pots, knobs, etc. Finding left overs a half century later is both rare and sheer luck, usually when cleaning out warehouses or the back room of an old music store that have sat untouched for years.
Yorkville bought quantities in the amounts that they felt made the best business sense for them from day one, when it was just Pete by himself or with his original two employees. Buy more, pay less per unit, while staying within your budget. That doesn't make Yorkville different from any other manufacturer that wants to stay in business and wholesalers have minimum order quantities, generally whatever the smallest manufacturer packaged amount is. A small case lot of pots is still a lot of pots. I saw proof of that last year on Kijiji when someone posted their YSR-1 as a 1964, based on the ink stamps on the pots. The amp wasn't introduced until 1968. You cannot determine the year of manufacture of a pre date code Traynor by the pot ink stamps, you can only determine that was the earliest year it could have been made but probably wasn't. Items like that didn't go from manufacturer to end user to product in days, weeks or sometimes even months or years, depending on purchased amount vs item use. Again, not unique to amplifiers, simple manufacturing reality in general.
Smaller caps, resistors, etc. you could buy by the card lot in the 60's, how much per card depended on the item size. Even one card could last months for small items.
As for whether Jack Long treated Pete Traynor fairly or badly, the record speaks for itself. It was Jack Long, not the company management that purchased Pete's share in YS/Traynor when Pete wanted out in 1976, not the 1980's. The date alone shoots a big hole in the story above, off by a decade, as is where he moved to at the time. Jack was co-owner and the primary financer of YS and Traynor from day one. Not many employer's would do that for an extremely junior employee, especially for a venture that had more risk than profit potential, then or now.
No Jack Long, no Yorkville Sound or Traynor and he had a long history of doing nothing but bailing people and businesses out and helping others get into business or remain in business at his own expense. It was Jack who put Pete's mental and physical health ahead of Yorkville or L&M profits at the end. Pete was burned out both mentally and physically. There were no "suits" involved.
"Pete Traynor left Yorkville in the Spring of 1976. For years he had been suffering with a bad back. The pain had been a factor in his lack of productivity, that problem being perhaps of more concern to Pete than to Jack. However Jack agreed to buy out Pete’s portion of the company over time so that Yorkville wouldn’t suffer a major financial jolt while Pete would be assured of an income for a good long time. That was it. After thirteen years, Yorkville was without the man who had once designed all of its products and who co-founded the company. Others were obviously capable of designing very successful products, but it was sad to see Pete go. In following decades Pete Traynor would undergo two bouts of spinal surgery and move to Truro, Nova Scotia then back to Toronto, all the while searching for the right relationship. Finally Pete met Susan, a lady from a small town north of Toronto. They were married and he settled down there to live among his gadgets and friends in a country setting. The classic “happily ever after”? One can only hope so."
Here's the following paragraph...
"Footnote: The term “pioneer” sometimes tends to get thrown around recklessly, but you can apply it to Pete Traynor without reservation. If being a pioneer means steaming into uncharted waters, sometimes against the sage advice of others and inventing solutions to problems no-one could ever have imagined, then Pete qualifies. His contributions to live music technology include the portable PA system, portable stage lighting, the guitar amp master volume control, reliable high powered bass amplification, the 8-10 bass cabinet, contract concert sound, the “wedge” floor monitor, and more. Additionally, vintage amp collectors around the world now regard some of Pete’s creations to be among the finest sounding, most durable amps ever built. Surely if the term “pioneer” ever needed a home it would belong with Pete Traynor."
The person who wrote all that didn't study it after the fact, he witnessed it first hand as a Yorkville 'suit'. I'm a big Pete Traynor fan but Jack Long deserves nothing but respect and credit for his part in the YS/Traynor history. The guy who took his time to document the history deserves as much respect and is still a 'suit' there today. Very nice man, tbh and questioning the legitimacy of his history is laughable to anyone familiar with the history from other sources. It is not only the best document in regards to Traynor equipment, it is the only document that covers the early years and a wealth of good information for vintage owners or collectors today that you cannot get anywhere else.
