Gonna have to tell Ishibashi and a few others about that new discount shipping method?
Careful.
I unloaded a LOT of 60's t-Bird parts when I house-cleaned a year or two ago. In the 70's I had three 64's and a 76 so all the handrests, pickup covers, etc. that were in "the dusty ignored boxes" got eBay. There was also a broke-neck one that got entirely de-parted(it was my spare parts bin). It was the 2nd broke neck of those and the last 64 I bought(partly for that reason). I've still got a 64 pickguard that has not surfaced yet. It is(was) not cracked or yellowed at the parts donor stayed in a 60's case. It should pay for a few sets of strings.
Not having a dig at the legit vendors of old parts, please note the use of 'most'. However it's a well known fact in the business that a lot of counterfiet 50s and 60s bass and guitar gear as well as instruments are sold through eBay to unsuspecting puchasers. I dumped a box load of old bits a couple of years ago through eBay myself, mostly mid-late 70s Fender parts.
Back in the early 80s I used to see box loads of 70s bass parts being dumped by the local shops from bridge replacements, pickup replacements etc. Mostly Fender bass gear here in Australia but on the guitar side a lot of Gibson stuff as well. At todays prices a couple of the larger shops probably scrapped well over a million bucks worth of gear that at the time was considered worthless.
However with that said I've seen first hand in Asia the forgers at work, (Thailand, China, Japan and Indonesia) and they get it right in every detail, even to the point of forging the writing style of hand written dates on Fender necks, aging stickers woods and metals, and so on.
They are so good at it in Japan that doubt if anyone would be able to tell the difference via a visual inspection. You'd need to run a battery of hugely expensive lab tests to date the lacquers and so on to prove conclusively it's not a forgery. After all, what's spending under a grand on making a forged 62 P bass when you're going to make 15K plus profit.
