More on the Storms from the Ovation Gallery

The catalogues are not always accurate.  Despite stating that Tornados, Typhoons and Thunderhead models were available in Green it was only ever done on the Thunderhead.  Also very few Tornados were actually built with white bound neck.

There is a difference on  pickup spacing.  It is not true that the pickup spacing between Thunderhead and Tornado is different.  Both the Thunderhead and Tornado started out with neck attachment at the 15th fret.  Earliest ones had squared off fretboard ends, in 1968 they went to the moustache shaped fretboard end.  These Thunderheads and Tornados had exactly the same pickup spacing.  Look at the photos of the red vibrato Thunderhead and the nutmeg Tornado for example.  Somewhere around 1971-72 they modified the neck angle adjuster slightly on BOTH the Thunderhead and Tornado and changed the neck attachment to 17th fret.  The neck pickup stayed in the original position, but due to attachment at 17th fret now there is a gap of about 1 inch between the neck pickup and the end of the fretboard.  Look for example at the photo of the natural Thunderhead.  Moving the neck attachment to 17th fret and keeping the same scale length meant that also the location of the bridge pickup and the saddle had to move forward.  Look at the location of the bridge pickup with respect to the F-holes.  because of the bridge pickup move, the pickup spacing was now reduced.  This occurred on both the Tornado and Thunderhead.  Sometimes these models are called "long necks" but they are the same scale length as they had always been.

Another little known fact is that the 12-string Hurricane came is two different neck widths.  The very early ones  had a 1-11/16 inch neck width.  This is VERY narrow for a 12-string.  In fact it is the same width as the 6-string storms.  Somewhat difficult to play.  The neck had to be that width because they used the same bodies for Hurricane and Tornado and they came from Germany already routed for that neck width.  Late in '67 they switched to the 1-7/8 inch more normal neck width.

There were also some "odd ducks" that came out towards the end of production in 1972-73.  Basically the factory used up all left over parts to build whatever storm models they could.  Some Thunderheads got chrome hardware, some Tornado's got bound necks, some Eclipse have gold hardware -  pretty nice.