Travis Bean made alum/necks but they put wood inserts in them as players found that the metal chilled the muscles in the hand and caused cramp, specially in cold venues, Valeno' ? veleno, made all metal guitars with pointy heads and chrome or gold plated finish , The Talbo's still come up on e-bay from japan and make good money.
Travis Bean did *not* put wood inserts in their necks, you're thinking of Kramer's aluminum neck models which are what Kramer instruments first started producing when Eddie Kramer left Travis Bean guitars to start his own company. The Kramers are vastly inferior to the Beans in my opinion, but Bean had the big issue of being a money-losing rather than money-making company.
Veleno guitars aren't really still around. There were surplus parts left from when they closed shop whatever it was, 30 years ago, which were discovered and assembled into "new" instruments a few years back.
Travis Bean made only one type of instrument- aluminum neck-through with a wood body. Mostly Koa.
Veleno made only one type of instrument, aluminum bolt-on necks with aluminum bodies.
Kramer made the worst, wood body, aluminum bolt-on neck.
I owned a TB-1000A for a while, as well as one of the Kramer aluminum neck basses. And I've never owned a Veleno but I played one owned by a friend and didn't like it so much.
I am the proud owner of two Electrical Guitar Company guitars, technically one guitar and one baritone, and I have a third on the way which is, at this point, about two years in the making. My first EGC is #032, a totally custom 30" scale baritone. 8 strings on it, it's like a 6 string but with the first and second strings doubled like a 12-string guitar. Kevin mentioned it specifically in the EGC write up in Premier Guitar magazine last year.
That one is an aluminum neck-through with a wood body (from a Gibson G3 actually). 30" scale tuned A-A. Kevin made it for me back in 2005. My second is an aluminum bolt-on neck that he made for someone else, that neck is 24" scale... I bought the neck used and paired it with a Jackson Kelly body (which would have come with a 24 fret 25.5" scale neck - turns out the 24" 22 fret neck is a perfect fit!). I have that one tuned Bb-C, in a "drop-D" style tuning except lower.
The new one, which is out for powder coating right now, is a 27.5" scale baritone, aluminum neck-through and aluminum body, 10 strings on this one. Like a 12-string guitar but with the thinnest pair of strings not there. It'll be tuned the same as my EGC/Jackson hybrid, down to Bb in a "drop-D" style tuning. That one is my own body shape design, too. Two years since I first sent the drawings to Kevin. It's been a hell of a long wait for me, and a major pain for Kevin.
Things have really taken off for EGC. Just a few years ago he was making instruments for himself and for a small group of not-terribly-famous people. More recently he's made instruments for a guy from Mastodon, Duane from The Jesus Lizard, King Buzzo from Melvins, and Robert Trujillo from Metallica. So it's getting harder and harder to get his time. He's got over 100 instruments on order right now just waiting for him to be able to work 50 hours a day instead of only 18.
The tuning this is an issue, but a small and easily manageable one. They stay in tune extremely well, once they're in tune. In the winter my baritone will drift a quarter step out of tune if I leave it in my cold car for a long time. And then it will be right back in tune when I warm it up to an appropriate temperature. It's not very different from a wood guitar in that respect, which also goes out of tune in with large temperature swings. But then, spring, summer, fall, it will stay in tune for months. Literally don't have to tune it for months.
Here's an article written about Kevin/EGC recently.
http://www.pnj.com/article/20110306...-his-trade?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE