Hi Mike,
please do me one favor. Shoot a front pic of the headstock, the lense 90 deg. to the surface, standard or better tele-lense, no wide-angle. It will answer the question, if it's a Tokai or Greco or any brand neck. I compared the neck of my Tokai hybrid of '80 or whatever and it was definitely a Tokai neck. Loudmouses' hybrid has a 100% Tokai neck as well. Why do I say this?
A Tokai Les Paul neck is recognizeable by its headstock, precisely the tuner line-up. All the Tokais I've had, no matter what model or year, have the same line-up. You can measure it very easily. The only exception is the 320, because it's completely handbuilt and different regarding body/neck construction. Even by headstock pix you can always recognize an almost square of the lower 4 tuners (E, A, h, e1). The tuner line-up is determined by a tooling machine that drills the 6 holes and apparently Tokai never changed those tooling machines. I don't know about Greco but their tuner line-up is different, it's close to the original Gibson line-up where all three tuner pairs usually spread upwards (see pic of Burny). It's recognizable as well by lots of pics on jp. auctions. So if you or anybody else own a Tokai Les Paul with a non Tokai tuner line-up that is not a 320, prove it by a pic of the headstock!
This is an example how to measure:
--------------------------------------------red-----yellow-----green-----blue
Burny Super Grade early '80---------41.5------43.0-------46.5-----83.0
LS-320 '99-------------------------------39.5------42.5-------45.5-----82.0
LS-50 '82--------------------------------42.5-------42.5-------44.5----83.0
LS-60 '01--------------------------------42.5-------42.5-------44.5----83.0
based on mm.
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Hi Ian,
I totally agree w/u. So why didn't they clone Reborns? Besides that nobody in '89 knew the value of a reborn or 25y old Love Rock in 2004. During the eighties used Grecos and Loverocks weren't that different concerning their values. And wouldn't it have made more sense to clone or fake the high-end Tokai Lesters. I've only seen LS-50. And why didn't they impress the serials like Tokai did? That would have made it perfect, but they decided to ink a wrong serialisation scheme instead.
P.S: I hadn't been in a meeting. I think...I asked myself.