I often read threads in forums about how to check if a certain part on a Fender vintage guitar is original or not. Of course there are countless books and websites which show many details that help to do so. However, there is one particular detail which is only rarely mentioned: the ‘dowel holes‘ on those old Fender bodies (I am not talking about ‘nail holes’ here!)

Dowel holes

If I understand it right, Fender used some clamps to hold the wood plank when sawing out the body. These clamps left two holes in the body which were filled with wooden dowels. These dowel holes are at exactly the same location on all old Stratocaster bodies – in fact all other models seem to have them as well, however, at completely different places than the Strat.

So if you happen to see an old stripped Fender body, you can easily spot these. New Fender and all the reissue bodies don’t have them. Thus this seems to be a reliable detail to tell an old body from a fake.

Unfortunately, you normally can’t see them on a painted body, at least not easily. However, if you know exactly where they are and observe carefully the way the body reflects light at these places, you might see them through the finish. This is because old nitro finish is often really thin and the dowel holes leave a tiny inaccuracy in the body surface. And of course there are all those Stevie Ray Vaughn or Rory Gallagher-like looking battered Strats which are partly bare of any finish and allow to see those dowel holes directly.

I am not sure in which year these disappappeared, I somewhere in the 70ies, when Fender switched to a different method of sawing out the bodies.

Theoretically  it is possible to fake these holes, too, but I think this is rarely done – yet …

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As many of you might already have noticed, I recently added a forum to this site.

We have the comment function below each blog post which has been used to discuss everything that is related to the post subject, but many times completely new threads emerged within the comments which became easily off-topic in a way. For this reason – and to make it possible for readers to start a new thread any time – I added a proper forum. The forum plug-in I found for this purpose is really great and offers a lot of cool functions. Almost every feature you know of other forums is here, too (like directly embedding youtube videos or pictures, PM’ing other members, and so on.

You can get to the forum via the link under ‘Pages’ at the top of the left sidebar. And there is a list of the latest forum posts a bit below in the sidebar, you can also get to the forum by clicking on one of the list entries.

You need to register to post but don’t be afraid, you will not be pestered with many newsletters or such. This is mainly to avoid spammers.

So after the last few days of testing I officially announce the new forum with this post. I hope there will be many interesting discussions, looking forward to it

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Mark Knopfler’s “Sultans” Strat (ser.-no. #68354) is from 1961. The second red Fender Strat he played with Dire Straits (ser.no #80470) was from about the same period (apart from the question in how far it was original Fender at all). For this reason I put together a table to give you a survey about the distinctive features that are different on a 1961 Strat compared  with earlier or later Strats.

	1961 Strat	before	later
Body wood	alder (ash for models in blonde)	light ash (swamp ash) until 1956	heavy ash in the 70ies
Fingerboard	slab board made of Brazilian rosewood	one-piece maple nack until 1959	curved rosewood venue from mid 1962 on, optional maple board in the late 60ies, one-piece maply neck available in the 70ies again
Pick-ups	staggered pole-pieces, formvar wire insulation, magnetic northpole on top	magnetic southpole on top in the early 50ies	enamel wire insulation from about mid 1964 on, flush polepieces from 1974 on
Pickguard	three layers (white/black/white) pickguard of celluloid, fixed with 11 screws, screw #3 between middle and neck pick-up	one layer plastic pickguard (or bakelite before 1957) until 1959, fixed with 8 screws (a few models with three layers and 8 screws in 1959)	screw #3 moved to middle pick-up in 1963, three layers plastic pickguard from 1965 on
Bridge	6 individual bridge saddles made of bent steel, separate steel tremolo block,	same	no separated tremolo block from 19xx on, diecasted bridge saddles,
Laquer	thin nitro laquer, standard was three tone sunburst (yellow/red/black), many custom colours available	thin nitro laquer, standard was two tone sunburst (yellow/black) until 1958, only a few (and rare) custom colours available	glossy polyesther finish from 1968 on
Tuners	made by Kluson, stamped with one line with “Kluson deluxe”	same	stamped with two lines with “Kluson deluxe” from 1964 on, made by Schaller from 1968 on
Pick-up switch	3-way	3-way	5-way from 1977 on
Body contours	deeply contoured - individual differences due to hand work	deeply contoured - individual differences due to hand work	becoming less contoured from the mid 60ies on
Stratocaster decal	gold “spaghetti logo” with two patent numbers	gold “spaghetti logo”, no patent numbers until 1960,	In late 1964 Fender changed to the fatter gold transitional logo,black logo from 1968 on three patent number 1963-1964, later 4 numbers
Peghead size	small	small	big head from 1966 on
String holders	one butterfly string holder	one round holder until 1956	two string holders from 1974 on
Number plate / neck fixation	4 screw number plate with stamped serial number	same (1954 models sometimes with serial number on tremolo plate)	stamped with big F from 1966on, three hole number plate from 1972 on
Serial numbers	5 digits, ca. 50 – 80,000 range	lower numbers	higher, starting with the letter L from 1964 on, 6 digits from 1965 on

Detail pictures

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With this article,  I want to feature my good old acoustic guitar: a Gibson MK-81 from 1976.

I got this guitar more than 20 years ago. I was looking for an acoustic guitar and was trying out all the guitars in that shop. After a while the shop owner brought one more from some room in the back,  saying I should try out this one, it was special. This was the Gibson MK-81, and in fact it sounded different from all the other guitars, it sounded more ‘expensive’ in a way, with a warm bass and brilliant treble, like a great HIFI speaker compared with a cheap one. He told me that this guitar had been damaged damage and was not professionally repaired (the bridge had solved from the top and had been glued back to its position, additionally fixed with two screws), and that it normally costs more than 3 times the money I wanted to spend.
Well, we agreed on a deal (I had to part from a nice Tokai Telecaster copy I had back then) and I took this guitar home with me. The damage could be repaired professionally for about 100,- € by the way.

The MK series

I had never heard about these guitars before, and there was not much information available. Remember, this was before the Internet, so you had to look through guitar books at the shop when searching for a particular information. Today it is so much easier. The story behind the Mark series seems to be like this:

In May of `73 Gibson began the Mark story by contacting Dr. Adrian Houtsma, Professor of Acoustic Physics at MIT, to confirm some research Gibson itself had initiated. Receiving a favorable review, Gibson then went to Dr. Kasha, who was at the time, a chemical physicist working as Director of the Institute of Molecular Biophysics at Florida State University. Combining the findings from Gibson` R&D department and Drs. Houtsma and Kasha, the company finally landed on the doorstep of well known luthier Richard Schneider, who was charged with making the scientific information practical, designing a guitar that fit with Gibson`s aesthetics and capable of being put into production. The Mark series was born…

The Mark series was no commercial success, rather the contrary as it seems. It turned out that science alone was not capable of building perfect guitars made of wood, a material that is unpredictable  because each piece of wood has individual features. After only 3 or 4 years Gibson dropped the Mark series again.

But these guitars were not really bad, and I heard from many owners how much they love their MK’s. The complete series consisted of 5 models, the MK 35, the MK 53, the MK 72, the MK 81, and the MK 99 (the higher the model number, the better the materials, and the higher the price).

Here is a page from a Gibson catalogue from that time that shows the different features of the different models:

The MK-81

Both the rim and back of my MK-81 are made of solid (!) rosewood (possibly Brazilian, but not sure), the top is solid spruce. The neck is curly maple, the fingerboard is ebony with mother-of-pearl inlays. There are some fancy details that make sure that this was the top-model of the production range (in fact, the MK-99 seems to be custom-made by luthier Richard Schneider himself only) like  the gold plated hardware or the black and red bindings.

It is a special guitar in fact. It is very deep, and the body and headstock shape looks somewhat unusual. The sound is warm and bright, a bit bell-like. With the heavy Gibson jumbo frets and the “fast” neck shape it plays almost like an electric.

Pictures of my MK 81

Youtube videos

Two of my latest youtube videos feature this guitar.

If you want the full story and more details of the Mark series, see this article in vintage guitar magazine.

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I have my National for some years now but never found the time, money, and courage to install a pick-up into this sensitive instrument. But a few weeks ago I decided to order what is said to be the best available pick-up for single cone Nationals: the iP-1X pick-up from Highlander – the same model that Mark Knopfler has in both his beautiful 1937 National and his new National.
I bought it new on ebay for USD 239 (169,- €), quite a lot of money for just a pick-up with an internal pre-amplifier, well, but a lot cheaper than the recommended retail price of USD 329.

What is always annoying here in Germany is that you have to pay not only customs (which in this case were only 2.7 %) but also 19% VAT, and this not only on the price of the item but also on the shipping costs (!?). You even have to pick-up the package from the local customs office.

In the box were the pick-up itself which is installed into a new biscuit (the piece of wood that holds the bridge) – so you have to exchange your old biscuit – the pre-amp which has to be installed in the interior of the guitar, a case for the external battery (replacing batteries inside of a National is no fun and puts stress on the cone construction), a guitar cable (stereo, one lead for the 9v battery power), and some velco tape to fix the cables inside the body of the guitar.

Installing the pick-up

Unfortunately this is a job that is not easily done, and does not take just a few minutes. The new biscuit with its bridge is much higher than the original one and has no grooves. It took me almost three hours to transfer the shape and height of the original bridge to a cardboard template, then to transfer it from the template to the new bridge, to cut it out roughly with a fret saw, to fine tune the contours with a file, and to saw the new grooves, again using the template. Of course I did this extremely carefully and slowly because I was afraid to cause some irreversible damage. Fortunateley the new bridge soon looked fine and was ready to install.

Normally you would ask a good local luthier for this job, but (a) there was noone near who had experience with Nationals and this pick-up, and (b) I like to do all kind of jobs on my guitar myself anyway. An experienced repair man surely will get this job done much quicker than me.

One thing that worried me was the fact that you need to drill a small hole into the cone (!) for the cable from the pick-up to the pre-amp. Besides two tiny screw holes on the wood stick inside the body to hold the pre-amp, this is the only irreversible modification of your guitar. I was reluctant when I learned about this before I ordered the pick-up because the cone is extremely sensitive, and also in my opinion a major sound difference between a vintage instrument and a new National. The hole could be pierced with a small prick first, then carefully drilled to 2,5 mm (3/32 “).  After threading the pick-up cable through the hole, I had to solder the RCA connector to the cable that is plugged into the pre-amp.

The rest was easy: the pre-amp is held by 2 little screws, like Mark Knopfler I used the f-hole for the output jack (no drilling required), and fixed all internal cables with the velcro tape.

The sound

After restringing the instrument, I was extremely curious how it will sound. I went directly from the pre-amp into the mixing desk and played the guitar over my studio monitors. What should I say, the sound was …. wonderful, sounds as you hear it from Knopfler’s guitar on his live recordings. The output seems to be rather hot, and the pick-up delivers the full range from bass, middle, to treble end. It is so balanced that I even did not have to adjust any EQ, sounded fine as it was. After adding some reverb it was perfect. I also could not detect any sound difference with the acoustic sound. Even at high volume I did not get any feedback problems, great!

Now it was also time to add a strap button to the heel of the neck so that I could play the guitar when standing, something I did not need before. I did not produce any sound clips because it really sounds just like the recent Knopfler live recordings (he had different pick-ups installed in the past I think), listen to Romeo & Juliet on the roadrunning live CD for example.

I would give 5 stars for this product.

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