Dimebag Darrell’s Washburn Dime 3 Prototype

This is the first guitar that Washburn sent out to Dimebag in 1994, based on the Dean ML. The guitar was a prototype, and sort of Washburn’s way of proving to Dime that they can make anything he needs. Soon after that, Dimebag signed a 10-year contract with Washburn and used a great variety of guitars produced by the company up until around 2004, when he returned to Dean.

To our knowledge, he never used this particular prototype guitar in any of the live performances.

Washburn Dimebag Specs

The Washburn guitars produced for Dimebag were, as already noted, based almost entirely on the Dean ML model. To avoid obvious copyright issues, Washburn adjusted the headstock slightly, so one horn was shorter than the other.

As for the specs, the majority of the guitars that were used by Dimebag had Floyd Rose tremolos, and a set of Seymour Duncan SH1-N’59 and Bill Lawrence X500XL set of pickups. The reason for this was the fact that this is how Dimebag had his “Dime from Hell” set up, and Washburn used that exact guitar as a blueprint.

Publicly Available Models

Washburn produced their ML guitars in a few different versions, but the two main ones were the Dime 3, and Dime 333. These both looked basically identical, but the Dime 3 was a more premium model made in the US, while the Dime 333 was outsourced to Korea.

Aside from these, Washburn also produced a Dime V, which was a Flying V-shaped model, a Dime 332, Dime 2, and a Dime ST Pro.

All the guitars that Dimebag used were of course custom made by Washburn, most with unique paint jobs, themed after a Pantera album.