instrument is a vibrato guitar, ice blue metallic (now aged to a Teal green metallic) with a matching headstock. It has five switches – four pickup controls (one per pickup – on/off/phased) plus a "lead/rhythm" Jaguar style upper-bout switch. It has two sets of volume/tone pots – rollers on top control plate (rhythm position) and traditional pots on the lower control plate (lead position). Porky's ice blue metallic Marauder has a 1964 ‘L’ neck plate and was fitted with plastic button "F" Grover tuning machines, which were not used on the Marauders in the 1965 catalog, and was delivered in a brown tolex case. All hidden 16 pole pickups were custom made for these Marauder I models. The present owner of this faded blue Marauder sample also has one spare pickup luckily found on eBay. At least five more of the original Marauder I models are known to have been produced. Fender and Bob Perine showcased two of these first Marauders, a sunburst vibrato version and a non-vibrato "hard-tail" green one, in their 1965–66 catalog as their most expensive guitars. Don Randall listed the instruments on more than one price sheet beginning in early 1965 before abandoning the project for unspecified reasons. Besides the three seen in Bob Perine's promo picture (including the rocker switch, slant fret), it is not known if any of the other sighted Marauders (another sunburst one now white and candy apple red) current whereabouts are. One possible reason they ditched the Marauder might have been a disagreement of some sort between the new CBS owners of Fender and Quilla "Porky") H. Freeman, the inventor of the Marauder and owner of the patent. Patent #3,035,472, dated May 22, 1962, covers the Marauder's under the pickguard pickups: "the construction is such that the electromagnetic pickups may be housed within the body of the stringed musical instrument..." After Fender bailed out, Porky took his patented hidden pickup design to Rickenbacker, and in 1968, Rickenbacker made one prototype of a four-hidden-pickups-beneath-the-pickguard guitar before apparently deciding against going into production, again for unspecified reasons. Variations Both the Fender and Rickenbacker four-hidden-pickups-beneath-the-pickguard Marauder prototypes survive to this day, but nobody has published any pictures of other original hidden-pickup Marauders and made their existence known to the guitar collecting world. Both of these prototype guitars were initially owned by Porky Freeman and their provenance from him to the current owners has been