Counterfeit Gibsons making the news

[prowla]

2 hours ago, Dan Dare said:

 

Agreed. This sort of thing is nothing new and isn't limited to guitars. A pal of mine is a violin maker. I won't drop his name, but he's highly regarded. He told me there are plenty of name instruments out there that are exactly as you describe - cut and shuts, refins, or originals with some non-original parts, rather than out and out fakes.

 

Virtually all Strads, Guarneris, etc have non-original necks and fingerboards, because the method of constructing and attaching the neck when they were made was different to how it's done now. Back then, the neck was not angled. It has been discovered since that angling the neck, creating a steeper break angle over the bridge, gives more power and a more brilliant tone, so pretty well all of them have been modified.

 

Others have replacement parts, due to the ravages of time, several hundred years of use and even unfortunate accidents. Some have few original parts left. The line between a modified original and a re-creation/'fake' can be pretty blurred.

Well, there are "Trigger's broom" instruments.

[diskwave]

Ali-express is full of them.

[Dan Dare]

3 hours ago, Belka said:

There is also the issue of fake provenance  - tenuous links to a star which may even be completely false to justify huge hikes in price.

 

Yeah. I've always thought that odd. You sometimes see a mass-produced instrument offered for sale, labelled "ex (fill in artist's name here)", with an absurd price-tag. How does the fact that it's got Jaco P's bogies and dead skin on the fingerboard make it worth twenty times the market price? Beats me.

[Woodinblack]

2 hours ago, Dan Dare said:

Yeah. I've always thought that odd. You sometimes see a mass-produced instrument offered for sale, labelled "ex (fill in artist's name here)", with an absurd price-tag.

 

Even worse - if they were still alive, its something that wasn't good enough for them so they sold because it wasn't worth what they would get for it.