'79 Fender Stratocaster - what price?

xmrchi

I had a 78 sunburst for 6 months, it had great mojo, but really the lack of contours and average build and hardware made me sell it on, vintage is a buzz word which has been eroding the guitar world for quite some time, old rarely means good, especially when it comes to the 70s, even the 70s utter trash guitars like Honda etc are starting to rise in price... Never a good thing.
On the plus side we have never had it do good these days, the Koreans and Chinese have upped their game to the point you can get a stage quality guitar for £300.

ICBM

mrchi said:

I had a 78 sunburst for 6 months, it had great mojo, but really the lack of contours and average build and hardware made me sell it on, vintage is a buzz word which has been eroding the guitar world for quite some time, old rarely means good, especially when it comes to the 70s, even the 70s utter trash guitars like Honda etc are starting to rise in price... Never a good thing.
On the plus side we have never had it do good these days, the Koreans and Chinese have upped their game to the point you can get a stage quality guitar for £300.

Assuming you mean Hondo , actually some of those aren't bad. I've had a couple of J200 copies that while not "great" guitars, were pretty good for a thirty-year-old plywood acoustic, and at least as good as what you can get for the same sort of money new now. Sounded decent, characterful and played well. The electrics are a bit more variable though.

I also had an early 80s Hondo II Everly Brothers copy which sounded better in some ways than my Lowden. And I'm really not joking.

I still wouldn't pay *more* for an old guitar than an equivalent new one just because it's old though.

Moe_Zambeek

You can get CS 70s models now. In fact the Trower sig (one of the versions anyway) is a full on 70s repro complete with 3 bolt neck, bullet truss and poly finish. Only well built

ICBM

Moe_Zambeek said:

You can get CS 70s models now. In fact the Trower sig (one of the versions anyway) is a full on 70s repro complete with 3 bolt neck, bullet truss and poly finish. Only well built

I thought they would probably have done a CS version by now, although I didn't know for sure.

Actually those neck features - designed by Leo personally, after he'd sold the company but was still acting as a consultant (which many people don't know/overlook) - are genuine improvements. It was just that the manufacturing quality was so poor that they got the guitars a bad reputation. But when done right - like he did later with MusicMan - they're much better.

xmrchi

@ICBM I am always happy to have my opinion changed, I would like to play a decent hondo, as I have never found one,

impmann

Spot on there, @ICBM. And don't forget that the principal was carried over into the later US Fenders with the micro-tilt four bolt necks.

GuitarMonkey

ICBM said:

GuitarMonkey said:

Yes, I think that if you can cope with the skinny neck, the 82 Strats are very well put together.

They really aren't anything special and were only desirable for a while because what came before and after was arguably worse. 

True. Not even arguably. They did use some nice wood though.

ICBM said:

But the current CS guitars are in a totally different league, so these should now be no more valuable than any other 80s Strat.

True again. 

Skipped

The term Vintage can be misleading. If you rated the Fender (guitar) output, year by year, for the past 64 years......2014 would be 43 places higher than 1979.

Probably.

Similar story with Gibson.

And I do not in any way under rate the pull of nostalgia (or a Year of Birth guitar) if that is the reason.

boogieman

Moe_Zambeek;268673" said:

You can get CS 70s models now. In fact the Trower sig (one of the versions anyway) is a full on 70s repro complete with 3 bolt neck, bullet truss and poly finish. Only well built

I had one of those, the full on Bridge of Sighs ltd edition one. Nice guitar but I never really bonded with it and it felt a bit underwhelming after a while. I eventually needed the money and sold it on. Certainly way better built and specced than a pukka 70s Strat .

gubble

I

Assuming you mean Hondo , actually some of those aren't bad. 

Oh how i loved my Hondo LP. It was my first guitar. It was terrible, really so bad it shouldn't be called a musical instrument.

Glad to know they all weren' horrific. 

Mine however was

ICBM

Skipped said:

If you rated the Fender (guitar) output, year by year, for the past 64 years......2014 would be 43 places higher than 1979.

'79 is probably the absolute low point for Fender quality, unless '80 and '81 are worse!

While it is true that they made a *few* nice guitars in those years, they seen to have been more by accident than design. They had really lost their way and CBS were already making big losses - they employed Dan Smith to try to turn it around but he was fighting an uphill battle, and they eventually sold the company only a few years later.

The odd thing is that the 'Dan Smith' Strats were built "right" in terms of design but still "badly" in terms of quality, whereas the model that followed - the 2-knob 'Freeflyte' US Standard, also a Smith era creation, was "better" made in terms of fit and finish, but designed "wrong"! They were so desperate to save on tooling costs that they redesigned the whole guitar so it could be routed from only one side in one operation - hence the abysmal Freeflyte trem (which must have cost a fair bit to develop) and the lack of the teardrop jackplate. These are probably the worst US-made Fenders. They even wired it wrong, in a way that increases noise and must have cost more to do… the single tone control is wired to all three tabs on the switch instead of simply connected to the volume pot.

Thank God for Fender Japan. Without them, we wouldn't now have a Fender USA (or Mexico) producing guitars the way they always should have...

ESBlonde

I'm not going to disagree with anything anyone here or elsewhere says about 70s fenders.

But I have a 76 strat that I bought in 81 when it was already marked. It was supposed to be my backup. In reality it has been played more than my main guitars over the decades because it (once fettled) is a dream to play and sounds distinctively fender. (Yes it's heavy and a shit brown colour too). I'm not selling mine even for that stupid money, I would not go looking for one now though the other options are far better value and usually better guitars.

richardhomer

ESBlonde;269049" said:

I have a 76 strat that I bought in 81 when it was already marked. It was supposed to be my backup. In reality it has been played more than my main guitars over the decades because it (once fettled) is a dream to play and sounds distinctively fender. (Yes it's heavy and a shit brown colour too). I'm not selling mine even for that stupid money, I would not go looking for one now though the other options are far better value and usually better guitars.

It is probably a much better guitar than a late '70s model.

Certainly the lack of contouring became very noticeable around '78. Yours might be heavy but later ones were commonly over 10lbs.

As you progress through the 70s, the odds of finding a good one get smaller with each passing year.

To be fair, one of the nicest Strats I ever played was a '72.

ICBM

richardhomer said:

Certainly the lack of contouring became very noticeable around '78. Yours might be heavy but later ones were commonly over 10lbs.

There's a '79 in the shop just now which weighs 10lb 4oz even though it's been refinished in something lighter than the original Thick-Skin armour plating.

Iamnobody

The asking prices for late 70's Fenders are silly these days.

I searched for one for a while but the price and uncertainty over serials resulted in me looking at other brands from the era.

But you could argue Fenders pricing for a simple bolt on construction are high anyway?

ICBM

Iamnobody said:

The asking prices for late 70's Fenders are silly these days.

But you could argue Fenders pricing for a simple bolt on construction are high anyway?

Not really. It actually takes better tooling to get the neck fit accuracy as good as Fender do, compared to as bad as Gibson do! Some of their attempts make Fender's 70s "pick holders" look positively tight. If you don't believe me do some Google image searches on things like "Gibson neck tenon" and prepare to be shocked . Just because they glue it up and finish over the top so you can't see it doesn't make it a more accurate method . Actually the three-bolt 70s Fender neck-tilt mechanism is significantly more work… and *would* work well, if they'd made it accurately.

But I agree that the prices of 70s Fenders are ludicrous nowadays - it's not just the neck pocket fit, there are so many other things wrong with them as well compared to modern ones.

richardhomer

ICBM;269107" said:

I agree that the prices of 70s Fenders are ludicrous nowadays - it's not just the neck pocket fit, there are so many other things wrong with them as well compared to modern ones.

I have a friend who owned a guitar shop until the early '90s and he used to reckon if you shoved a late '70s Fender in the ground, it would carry on growing....

Iamnobody

ICBM;269107" said:

Iamnobody said:

The asking prices for late 70's Fenders are silly these days.



But you could argue Fenders pricing for a simple bolt on construction are high anyway?





Not really. It actually takes better tooling to get the neck fit accuracy as good as Fender do, compared to as bad as Gibson do! Some of their attempts make Fender's 70s "pick holders" look positively tight. If you don't believe me do some Google image searches on things like "Gibson neck tenon" and prepare to be shocked . Just because they glue it up and finish over the top so you can't see it doesn't make it a more accurate method . Actually the three-bolt 70s Fender neck-tilt mechanism is significantly more work… and *would* work well, if they'd made it accurately.

But wouldn't all that be sorted and accuracy come with CNC for Fender these days?

I've seen some of the Gibson neck tenons and wasn't impressed!

ICBM

Iamnobody said:

But wouldn't all that be sorted and accuracy come with CNC for Fender these days?

Yes, and by the same token it should for Gibson as well! But they still insist on fitting the necks by hand...

There's probably not a lot in it in terms of construction - Fenders should be a bit easier to make, but not much - the other materials and overheads costs are probably more important. Labour is the big one, and is why all the big US manufacturers are (broadly) similar priced, Mexico and Japan are somewhat cheaper, and China and other developing far-east economies much cheaper.

Bucket

I've played a couple of '78 and '79 Strats that I thought were pretty nice. Maybe they were accidents. 

Only plugged one in - it was really, really light (probably about 6 or 6 1/2 lb) which made me suspect something was wrong with it. It was nice though - endearingly hideous dinged-up poo brown, with a super-hot aftermarket bridge singlecoil. I think it was about £1100.