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Alas, there's more than one meaning of "vintage" in play
A simple question of age - "X" years
A subjective identification of "the good old days"
A time before an objective change
And for Fender and Gibson specifically, that means "before the accountants took over" e.g. pre-CBS
Is my old Subaru vintage? In years, yes...but with low profile radials, power steering, disc brakes, electronic fuel injection...not really IMO. To me that means crossplies and carburetors.
At the point people started talking about Vintage Fenders, all the meanings co-incided.
But....mid/late 66 is a fixed cutoff for the CBS changes.
A 71 tele is well into the CBS era so not vintage under the original guitar specific definition.
Which is annoying, because my birth year is mid CBS, but it is what it is. It might explain my knees, though!
Jimmy did you sell that lovely 62 Strat you got from Gary Winterflood?
That said, if we take that definition literally, it could be used to mean that any old guitar made prior to 1984 would be a vintage item, and clearly a guitar which only ticks that basic chronology box by dint of being made prior to a certain year, is not what everyone would regard as a vintage guitar in terms of desirability. This is why in the broader sense amongst dealers, such aged items are typically only referred to as vintage if they are particularly evocative of an era, significant in terms of design or features, or desirable for some other reason, such as rarity or condition.
It is also why you see some other terms being bandied about to make old stuff which people are trying to sell, seem better than it actually is. A classic example of that is when people try to sell crappy old Les Paul copies on Ebay for several hundred quid by describing them as 'lawsuit era' guitars, when in fact there never was any law suit in regard to them, or any other similar guitar for that matter, but they hope by citing this widely believed fictitious legal myth, that it will convey the idea some cack plywood monstrosity was somehow so good that Fender and Gibson felt compelled to resort to legal action in order to destroy such a damaging threat to their sales, when that of course never happened at all.
So yeah, a 70s Fender Telecaster or Gibson SG etc, is certainly vintage, whereas a 70s Kay LP copy is more than likely just a crappy old guitar, but a Kay Effector LP copy, by being unusual and fairly rare in decent woking order, could be considered a vintage item..