Recent content by Homer J. Simpson

I've seen that BS a few times, as if CNC is a bad thing and what's not CNC must be handmade by nude elves and supervised by wizard unicorns giving each part the magic pixie dust. Zero clue what CNC means but C =computer =soulless robot overlords =deytookourjooobs =baaaad mkay? :)

Wow...as late as 1986... I think by now it's safe to assume the (Matsushita) code is what it looked like last year. :)(y)

OK that changes the suspicion I had here a bit, the guitar in question (also shown in this thread post #3) was likely not some private labeling job. That implies that Tokai may have distributed this one particular model to some extent. I say distributed because Tokai had their own history of...

Actually the article says that the last "signs of life" the author saw were from 2003, so that doesn't necessarily mean they ceased to exist at that point (or at all, maybe they are into kitchen appliances or nuclear plant equipment and whatnot now). :)

So to return this thread to the OP, welcome catseye! Your guitar was likely made in the same Korean factory that made Tokais and (sorry for the lame pun) I'm sure it's a Fine guitar! 🤪 Hey, I got a Chinese Tokai... ... hat today! I'm pretty sure it's not legit (so don't ask me where I got...

Yup, I was just studying those a little, the list you made seems to check out just fine. The weird 8-digit numbers are mysterious for sure (and if the article linked in the other thread is right 1995 would be more likely for those) but that doesn't change the big image, given the seemingly...

Yeah, having read the other threads now/again it seems almost plausible how they moved to China post 2003. Too bad we'll probably never know for sure if that was an "official" Tokai maker all the time even after the Korea factory was closed, some other thread brought up the Chinese "Saein"...

Article in German magazine states (no source) that Fine Corporation started production in Korea in 1994 and ended around 2003, there was a website but it's gone. It could be speculated that they shut down the factory in Incheon, Korea and continued in China after that.

Fine Corporation, Korea/China? (that's a name I found floating around repeatedly in context with Epiphone, but never saw any evidence/factory website/pics, but I didn't look very hard)

Not sure what you mean by "angled fretboard"? The Maxon pickups date to December 1975, the pot codes seem to be 751 which could mean early May 1977, both could've been transplanted from another guitar tho.

Hard to tell without close-up pictures and some of the bottom and DC-R readings. They look like Hofner 512 pickups but I guess they are Japanese "Shin-Ei" copies of them (the only Japanese 512 copy to be found on the internet I guess).

I'm seeing this since I check the various platforms on a regular basis (or just see what Sigmania digs up on YJ) - some models often seem to surface in bunches for some (probably weird) reason, sometimes even on YJ. For example, when I started looking for a spaghetti TE70 Custom there were zero...

I'm sorry, that's a very broad question and therefore difficult to answer. What particular models do you mean? Why are you asking for these particular years? What are you generally looking for in a Strat? Maybe it's easier to point you to a particular model you could go on a hunt for when we...

You're #2 today! :) Same thing like over here: https://www.tokaiforum.com/threads/help-i-need-help-to-identify-this-tokai.29474/

Really hard to see, there's also always a possibility that it was Monday morning and someone grabbed the wrong stamp, looks like a one-piece body tho and I guess anything lower would be 2-pc. No doubt the body is matching the neck.