TE-150 B Bender Tele

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Cool, so thats may 1980? Thats when i was born :)
Yes Felix, when i finish the house (may-june) i'm going to invite you for coffee/whiskey/tokais :lol:
 
Beautiful guitar duff!! Thanks for posting pics, nice to see those close ups.


Reborn Old said:
I think those cases were an extra 14k yen over and above the 150k purchase price in 1980.

13k and included
 
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Reborn Old said:
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You are showing a partial pic of a Love Rock headstock with a Reborn Old hangtag for a LS-150. Reborn Old hangtags were used up to at least1985.
So that's a 1981 or younger Love Rock LS-150.
The case is 14k yen. Love Rock cases went from 12 to 14k in 1981. And as you see were originally included in the price of the higher end models (otherwise a LS-150 would cost 150k yen without case).
My 1981 LS-200 was 202k yen. If it was build a year earlier it would be 200k including case. My 1980 LS-120 was 120k including case.
The ST/TE cases however did cost 13k yen in 1980. Look it up, you will see..

PS I now see the finish colour is VOS, so probably a younger model
 
Cases were priced separately regardless of model MSRP.
I was guessing at TE-150 MSRP, as it wasn't even listed in 1980 catalogs.

 
Hi guys,
Just a quick note here . . .

The LS-150 colour is OS, not VOS.
From the hang tag alone I would say the guitar is an '81 or 82 model.
It may seem distinguishable but the model is an LS-150 V with OS as the colour.
In 81 and 82 LS-100 to LS-200 were added as a V for vintage with slightly fatter necks and flame tops (some veneer, some solid) so for these 2 years you could get 3 LS-100 models - each with a different neck shape:
LS-100 = '58 plaintop : LS-100S = '60 mahog top : LS-100V = '59 flametop

In 1983, they dropped the 'V' suffix and the hangtag also changed to a blue colour and had the script logo and some red, white and blue waves on it (from memory)
In terms of cases, going by the model number is a good indicator of which guitars came with a case as mandatory. In Australia all LS and ST models had a seperate cost for the case - with the exception of the LS-200 and TE-200 whose 200,000yen price tag included a case. (We never ordered any LS-150 or TE-150) As best as I can remeber, no ST or SS model ever had a case included in it's price

Peter Mac
 
I met a guy in september at the Veenendaal guitar show here in Holland who sold Tokai's in 1981. He told me that in 1981 regarding LS models LS-120 and higher were shipped and sold including case, lower than that a case was optional. Which is in line with how guitars are marked in the catalogs, other years might have been different.
 
Thanks for all the info!
Back to the te-150. This one is different from the others i have seen.
I did some research and actually got a mail back from Gene Parsons!

So here is another mystery for you experts.
Ok, so the back cover is different from the 3 other te-150's i ve seen pictures of. They all have the logo on them, while mine has a back cover saying Parsons/ White string bender.
The weird thing is this back cover predates the ones with the logo.
(a cover alone like this was just sold on ebay for $300)
I'm not sure when the new style cover was introduced.

Gene was pretty sure that the tokais all had the logo cover,
but he also recognised the bender mechanism as the real deal.
So either I have a real early one, or someone installed an older parsons/white bender into a te-80.
Someone at tdpri was pretty sure it was a original Gene Parsons build,
Gene doubts that. But i can't even remember what i did last week so who knows..
So for now I think it's a tokai build te-150, and somehow an older probably left over back cover slipped between the newer style covers.
Ofcourse pure speculation.

Some other facts:
My guitar was first finished, then routed for the bender.
I think i see some bare wood in the route on a pic from another te-150, but can't be sure.
There are some markings in the rout, guess it sais '#7 ok'
I emailed a japanese tokai owner who had a tokai eb bender, and a tokai b bender. He didn't have more pics and my japanese isn't that good :), but i think he said he ordered them both from tokai at the same time, and had to wait 6 months to get them.

That's all i found out. Either way, the guitar is staying. I forgot how great teles were. Only thing i might be changing is the bridge. I like the ashtray model better. Have to find out if they align.
 
Ok i found another Tokai with the same bender cover (the one without the logo), so now we know that these covers were used. They are actually 70's covers, so my guess is the first ones had the old style covers. Just a guess ofcourse.

Mine is definitely routed after being finished.
I now got some pics from a very friendly japanese te-150 owner.
His is one routed before finishing, 1981, logo back cover, no number stamp on the neck and no traces of a sticker.
Lovely guitar.
 
Good info Duff, it sure would be nice to find one with a model # sticker. :)

Thanks !
 
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