Pepe said:They came out in 2001, but with a different headstock to this one. Tokai had to change it due to copyright laws and potential litigation from PRS.
ned said:The LR40's are no longer made.
There are no US dealers at this time. Your best bet is to contact a Canadian dealer or a dealer in Japan.
JSD - can you get custom MIJ Tokai's?
Ned
ampmaker said:40000 yen for a set-neck guitar (relatively labour-intensive) that's made in Japan in 2004 seems suspicously low to me.
ScottA said:The Tokai PRS my buddy bought has the recessed knobs and such. His is quilted. I'm pretty sure its Korean, as it has the printing on the back of the headstock. I think it has a made under liscence disclaimer and it might even say "made in Korea".
ArthurS said:I just spotted this auction (link) on eBay, which is for a supposedly Made in Japan PRS copy. Now I know Tokai has some Korean PRS models in the $500 range that are supposedly really nice, and there are also two MIJ models (LR30 and LR40) that cost over $2000.
The interesting thing is that this auction is for a 'PR-85Q', that looks a lot like the LR40 in the link above, but only costs $699. At first I thought it was a Korean model, since I couldn't spot a serial number and it has a truss-rod cover with three screws, but the aforementioned LR40 also has the three-screw truss-rod cover. Furthermore, this particular guitar doesn't have the lines of text on the back of the headstock that most Korean models seem to have ("Made Under License etc").
Does anybody have any idea on what we have here? A new Japanese model or Korean after all?
ArthurS said:Update! I just got back an e-mail from the seller of the guitars. He said the ones that were up for sale for $699 are definitely Made in Japan. The scale, according to him, is 'just like the PRS'. If this is in fact the case, that would mean 25" (I assumed Tokai had decided to just go with 25,5" or 24,75", but apparently they tooled up for 25").
Finally, he said that he hadn't seen any Japanese guitars with a tremolo yet. The only PRS-copies with a whammy bar he had sold until now were Made in Korea ('months ago').
They still look like interesting guitars to me, even thought they don't seem to be as 'accurate' as Tokai's Les Paul copies.
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