Vintage Tokai are great guitars, but there is one thing I personally don't like. ”Silver Dot” .

[jselect]

The vintage Tokai is a great guitar, but there is one thing I personally don't like. This is a silver dot position mark used on a rosewood fingerboard.

Far from the color and atmosphere of the original clay dots, I feel that it destroys the overall impression. The black dot position on the maple fingerboard is not out of place.

The ES type also uses real mother-of-pearl and has a sense of dignity, while Gibson's original is a pearloid dot.

Why did Tokai use the silver dot position on the rosewood fingerboard? Only there is a long way from the "replica".

Am I the only one who feels this way?

 

[Sigmania]

Silver dots?

Mine look like this on my rosewood board Tokais.

 

[jselect]

Yes, but unlike the Fender's clay dots, they are slippery and shiny, and look silvery depending on the angle. At some angles it looks white, but its texture is quite different from clay dots.

 

[Voidoid56]

As far as I know, that's one feature that none of the Japanese manufacturers or brands copied, at least not in the 70's and 80's. Even early 80's Fernandes RST's (otherwise going for a level of year-by-year vintage accuracy a tad more OCD than even Tokai) come with pearloid or silvery dots.

But I mean, one thing to remember when looking at these guitars is that the originals they copied where nowhere near as meticulously researched 40 years ago as they are today. Since they weren't worth fortunes back then, there was less of an incentive to do so. At that time, the term "vintage guitar" meant pre-war US acoustics, not 15-25 years old electrics. These days, you need to count pickguard screw threads simply to ascertain that someone about to pay tens of thousands of bucks for an all-original guitar gets his money's worth. Back then, they cost a few hundred dollars, so no one cared that much. And the guitar-buying public hardly had any clear picture of the finer details at the time either. I mean, there was no internet to hand you hundreds of detailed pics, only whatever happened to be featured in the current issue of Guitar Player magazine, basically. Different times.

But having said that, yeah, I agree, I wish to hell they'd had clay dots too. But I guess no one noticed them at the time.

 

[Sigmania]

Vintage Fender Clay Dots | Pre CBS Stratocasters

“Ready for the true story? They are not clay at all. And they weren’t always yellowed or grayish colored either. At one time they were white as seen in the image below of a 1961 Stratocaster in great condition.



You can tell from that image that the last couple of dots are showing a little yellowing but the upper neck dots are still pretty white. The reason is that they are actually made from white vulcanized fiberboard.

The image below is from around 1959 and shows a worker in the Fender factory with a huge Folder’s coffee can full of those white fiberboard cutouts putting them into slab board necks.”

 

[Voidoid56]

Great info, thanks. Kind of puts things in perspective: the 1964 Strats Tokai copied were 14 years old when they began doing it in 1978. Kind of hard to replicate aging that in many cases probably hadn't even happened yet.