Being a huge guitar nerd since the age of 8, I received mine for my 10th birthday: an early 80s model finished in black with a natural headstock. Here I am at age 11, posing proudly in my elementary school photoshoot with it:
The biggest disappointment was the bridge: it had no contact with the wood whatsoever, simply resting on the thick pickguard, held in place by the pressure of the strings and supported by two thin pieces of cloth underneath the bridge posts. This meant that if you used .009 strings, a heavy gauge pick, and some punk rock attitude like I did back in the day, the bridge would move around a lot, constantly throwing the guitar out of tune. I also remember the controls being somewhat confusing, the neck pickup always sounding bassy and muffled, while the bridge pickup sounded tinny and had much less output than the neck pickup. When I got my hands on a cheap Cort Strat copy later that year, it felt like jumping from public transport into a Bentley. My dad gave it a cool psychedelic paint job with oil colors without a clear coat (which means I hesitate to touch it, fearing I'll ruin it). I later attempted to convert it into a hardtail using a random Chinese Strat bridge, but I lost interest after a couple of hours, and it's been sitting bridgeless in my mom's basement ever since.
A couple of months ago, I spotted a first series Jolana Galaxis for sale a few blocks away from my girlfriend's house. The first series sports white plastics and matching headstocks, making them somewhat rare. They're also rumored to be of higher quality than the later models. The price was too good to pass up (40 euros, if I recall correctly), so I went for it. It had a piece of binding missing on the neck and some odd screws missing here and there, but I was really surprised by how good it sounded even with some ancient light gauge strings on it. I took it to my tech, we replaced the rusty and unreliable output jack, put on a fresh set of 10-52s, made a tremolo arm for it, and voilà - it came to life.
I realized this guitar is seriously cool. The infamous bridge is still resting on the pickguard, but in this early example, it's secured in place with two pieces of leather underneath the bridge posts. Surprisingly, it works. It holds tune just fine, even when going crazy with the vibrato (which is a standard Jolana affair from the time, a bit less refined variation on a Jazzmaster/Jaguar unit). The coolest feature, in my opinion, are the tone controls: They act like normal tone controls from 0 to about 5; from 5 to 10, they gradually split the humbuckers into single coils, so at 10, you get a tapped single coil sound, at 5 you get a humbucker with the tone wide open, and at 0, you get a humbucker with no treble. This is really cool.
This experience managed to convince my colleague to get our YouTube channel (Junkyard Gear), focused on reviewing weird old guitar related stuff, back on track, and we made the first new episode about this very Galaxis and compared it to a vintage Jazzmaster from the same year: think cold war arms race, but with offset guitars.
Here's our video review where we compare it to the Jazzmaster from the same year
Congratulations
The bridge position sound surprised me so much that now I wanna make a Jazzmaster frankenstein with trad JM pickup at the neck and Galaxis pickup at the bridge.