1959 Stratocaster and Amp.

Rick Collins · From: Claremont , CA USA

On PBS TV Antiques Road Show a 1959 Fender Stratocaster (with some scratches in the finish) and with a mint tweed case and mint tweed amp was valued at $25,000.

The amp looked like it had one 10 inch speaker.

Dave Mudgett · From: Central Pennsylvania and Gallatin, Tennessee

Yep - they're not just guitars and amps anymore, but American cultural icons.

There are also a lot of serious "investors" trading in these nowadays, sorta looking at them like they are Stradivari. Only time will tell if this keeps up on the long haul. At the recent appreciation rate (some of these things have doubled in the last couple of years), they ought to be close to a million in 10 years. Let's see - how many Stradivari were produced? And how many Pre-CBS Stratocasters? Hmmm...

Part of this is probably the exchange rate - the dollar is seriously down, so the cost in strong foreign currencies doesn't seem so bad. Part of it is also the effect of ebay on the market.

But seriously - if you look at an index of the "desirable" vintage guitar collectibles for the last 20 years, it has strongly outperformed any investment vehicle I know of. But especially with Fenders, avoiding forgeries and examples that are not what they say they are requires a lot of expertise, since they are parts guitars.

David Mason · From: Cambridge, MD, USA

In the late 60's and early 70's, there were at least half a dozen Japanese companies pumping out exact or near-exact copies of Stratocasters, Telecasters and Les Pauls. Then, companies like Ibanez, Tokai, Hondo and Vantage got hit with some lawsuits from Fender and Gibson and began producing their own lines of guitars, some of them quite successfully. If you went to a guitar show in the late 70's or early 80's, there would be a handful of "vintage" guitars at best, each dealer might have one or two - back then the biggest collectables were old archtops, D'Angelico and Strombergs and such. By the middle 90's, there were hundreds of vintage Fenders and Gibsons for sale at each big show, and now with Ebay there are thousands. My Gosh - I wonder what happened to all the old routing templates and machining plans that the Japanese companies used to use to make Strat copies?

I have a couple of friends in the antiques business, and in the furniture end of it the standard estimate is that about 90% of the "antiques" are fake. Furniture is made out of wood and hardware, and finished with lacquer or paint. Fake furniture is made out of artificially-aged wood and fake-antique hardware, and finished with lacquer or paint in ways to make it look old. You can buy a "Fender" neckplate on Ebay for $5, and sell one stamped with a "genuine vintage" serial number for $200. You can buy "genuine" spaghetti-logo Fender decals for $5. There are quite a few people in the business of making masterful brand-new antique furniture, in fact I have a book out of the library right now that discusses how to duplicate or create "antique"-looking wood finishes. Gosh.

Joe Allwood · From: Russell, IA 50238

Yeah, did you notice the extreme lack of neck wear and that there was no date in either the neck pocket or on the neck? Fishy...

John Billings · From: Ohio, USA

I have a '57 Strat. The only date on mine is on the neck.
Penciled in "1957." No month. Things weren't always done the same way, but no dates? Hmmmm....................
There's a lousy pic of mine here:
http://homepage.mac.com/jb181/PhotoAlbum1.html

Keith Cordell · From: San Diego

I also noted, with some alarm, that the guy took no precautions when removing the neck and backplate. There was no marking on the neck ( not a total issue) yet he didn't do the research prior to taping the encounter to check the date codes on the pots, or check the pickups. On every previous episode where a strat was featured, they checked this stuff before taping. When he removed the backplate a large chunk of finish came with it; he played it off as "a good thing", and he never even mentioned the model or anything else important about the amp.

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