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-   -   What the Hell Is this Guitar? (http://www.guitartricks.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3021)

Tommy9 01-14-2002 03:06 PM

I have 4 guitars. 2 are junky acoustics, 1 is a Harmony Strat Style guitar. I've been saving for a new guitar for about 6 months. I'm only 15 and i work part time and go to school and still find time to play guitar.
Anyway my 4th and final guitar is a bit of an odd site.
It is an electric solid body. I bought it for $7 from my 6 year old neighbor. Hehe, i've never seen one like it. It's green apple burst. It has 4 single coil pickups with Jaguar style single switches below each pickup. Vibrola system, and a wild looking bridge. A 50's style Fender Strat Headstock, and 2 rather long but narrow horns. Can anyone help me out any please tell me. I DO have a pic of the body but i have taked the pickups and hardwear off to strip it and re-paint it. The paint was scratched off in places anyway.

blackrose 01-14-2002 03:11 PM

Its probably a mix of different parts. Pickups from one guitar, neck from another, bridge from another, so forth.

Tommy9 01-14-2002 03:32 PM

The kid i got it off of got it froma yard sale. The person obviousley had no idea what they were doing. All the parts are the original parts due to color and synchrinization. The body has a small notch in directly where the rod on the botom of the neck comes out. The colors all match and the paint smells like **** when you sand it off.
With my luck it is Lead paint but, that's ok.

educatedfilm 01-14-2002 04:44 PM

Post a photo if you can... It sounds pretty damn funky... How does it sound?

PonyOne 01-15-2002 07:06 AM

I SAW ONE OF THOSE, I think, about 6 months ago for $100 at this really dumpy little guitar shop here in Boston that only deals in heavily used, weird knockoffs and such. It also had the vibrola, and if I recall correct it had four Jaguar-like pickup selector switches and I think the pickguard had a gaudy pattern on it. I was thinking of buying it cause it was so damn odd.

It's a copy of a Mosrite, I think it was by Tokai, a high-volume Japanese guitarmaker. Nowadays they're about on par with Samick in terms of quality but they used to be pretty low-end.

Many of their guitars sold in the US didn't have the Tokai name on the headstock or "MADE IN JAPAN" stamped on the back because at the time, Made In Japan was synonymous with "no-skill crap knockoff" in the US. The company Aria was originally Arai, but they decided that if they wanted to break into the anti-Japan US and UK markets, they decided that it'd be better to switch it. It's not hard to figure out how the came up with Aria...
They get a worse rap than they should; if you replace the pickups and make sure the neck doesn't bow (big problem w/Japanese guitars of that era) it's a perfectly good, playable instrument.

Tommy9 01-15-2002 03:14 PM

I just looked at a bunch of Tokia guitars on the web and minet wasn't even remotley like any of them. The pickgaurd does have an odd design and it's alot like a Fender Mustang pickgaurd it goes all the way down. It has 5 knobs on it.
1 master voluem and the rest tone.

PonyOne 01-16-2002 05:35 PM

I'm still 90% sure it's a Tokai...you may not have seen that exact one that you have, but since they produced thousands of guitars a year, and had dozens of models, they'd often make "Special" models made of the excess parts laying around the plant; in effect, a factory frankenstein. Then they'd pass them off as being form a "limied run" or "one of a kind."

If you look at the yearly, or sometimes quarterly, catalogs that these companies had back in the 60's it's nuts. In one year they'd have four times the new models than Fender or Gibson have ever had of any type of model. There are other Japanese makers it could have come from; Guyatone, for one, made tons of weird guitars.


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