Robert was a successful executive and business owner, whose company designed and manufactured custom fasteners; some of which wound up in early United States space program rockets.
[citation needed] Dean began tinkering with electronics early on in his childhood; he was taking radios apart to see what made them work & reassembling them at age eight.
Dean's guitars have been played by various artists: Dimebag Darrell, Michael Schenker, Helloween, Kansas, Leslie West, Glenn Dean (Motor City Bad Boys), The Cars, Heart, The Doobie Brothers, Jefferson Starship, Dave Mason, Triumph, Iron Maiden, Sammy Hagar, Def Leppard, Nils Lofgren, Larry Crane (John Mellencamp Band), ZZ Top and Karl Sanders of Nile.
Anheuser-Busch once commissioned Dean (DBZ) to design and make a limited set of specially shaped Budweiser[1] and Busch Beer[2] guitars used in promotions across North America.
More importantly, while some would have paid anything to get their hands on a vintage Gibson Flying V, Dean not only had one in-hand, but he also sawed it in two, right down the middle to start measuring and setting his sights on making a better instrument.
[citation needed] While attending high school in Highland Park IL, Dean began offering his services to local music shops and to Chicago area guitar players for repairs, custom paint jobs[8] and soon gained a reputation among local storeowners as someone to turn to for services that went beyond what most of them could offer in-house.
Dean took one such tour to learn what machinery one would need in order to accomplish setting up a production run of their own designs.
After two trips to the Kalamazoo factory, this quick study yielded a plan to seek out similar equipment to start his own company.
Dean set up his first manufacturing shops in the Chicago area, with all work being closely supervised personally by him on a daily basis.
Dean broke this mold with his designs and marketing, leading People Magazine to do a feature story on Mr. Zelinsky when he was only 21 years old.
Dean was lured back into the music industry, taking on the challenge of helping to re-build the brand he started nearly two decades earlier when the offer came.
[citation needed] Dean also did some mentoring, which was the case when he spent some time at an in-store event in Dallas, TX with a young guitar player that appeared asking for his autograph.
[citation needed] Dean's son, Tyler, coincidentally had conducted the last video interview with Dimebag just weeks before his untimely demise.