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I remember looking for Orville and Burny Les Pauls 10-15 years ago but never picked one up. So some of this knowledge has been floating around for quite some time.

The thing that amazes me is that some Tiesco and other no name guitars go for serious money these days. Don't get me wrong. I think they are cool looking guitars, I'm just not sure they are a good value considering what else you can buy in the $500ish range.

Totally agree with you.  That's just madness, especially given how much cheap guitars have improved over the last 10-20 years.  As is often remarked upon here, you can get a pretty nice guitar for under 500 bucks these days as the Chinese have really stepped up their game.  Those Tiesco and Silvertone guitars are basically junk.   Kinda cool junk, but definitely badly made.

Are you suggesting that the rise in value of those old, cheap instruments is a knock-on (or even direct) effect of the rise of the lawsuit/MIJ thing?  I'd never thought about that, but I'd absolutely buy into it.

I had a healthy interest in Japanese guitars when I living there, and those Orville models were near the top of my list.  But I never bought one.  I almost bought an Orville 335, but I (stupidly) cheaped out.  If memory serves, they wanted something like 70,000 yen for it, which was quite a lot for a Japanese-made guitar ten years ago.  Anyway, I guess we all have regrets.  I came across some nice Burny LP copies, too.  My impression of those guitars were that the quality varied a fair bit, but some were great and they were really cheap at the time.  Like $300 cheap.

I wonder about is whether all the foreign attention to these guitars has rehabilitated their image in the minds of Japanese players.  Do Japanese guitars now recognize that their domestic market produced some really nice (and now vintage) instruments?  Or do they laugh at all the foreigners who have convinced themselves that their domestic guitars are somehow great?

Yeah, by domestic I meant the Japanese market. 

Which isn't surprising.  A lot of the stuff you see over there is pretty different from the stuff you find over here.  Although there's been so much importing over the last 10 years or so that that's starting to change.

What I'd really like to know is the history of how these guitars became such a word-of-mouth phenomenon in the last decade.  Because ten years ago it really wasn't much of a thing.  Now there are whole businesses that cater to foreign (non-Japanese) buyers.  Someone should bone up and write an article about that.  It'd be at least as interesting as the history of the lawsuits.

One other thing: that Smith interview makes it out like Fender had no relationship with Tokai.  I'm pretty sure that's wrong.  Tokai made a lot of stuff for Fender early in the "lawsuit" era, but their production was for domestic market.  I'm pretty sure I read that in a trade publication.  Looks like he wants to downplay that in the interview, my guess is out of a sense of loyalty towards Fujigen, which was his main partner at the time.  Smart move, too, because that'd really matter to the Japanese partners if they saw the interview.

The lawsuits are about the shape of the instrument, many of which followed the profile of American instruments exactly.  But when people talk about a "lawsuit guitar" they don't mean "one of the models that a company literally got sued over."  They mean a Japanese-made instrument from the 70s-90s taken to be of high quality--so high quality that marquee American brands like Fender and Gibson sued them to try to stop them from "taking over the market."  Is that a fanciful tale?  Of course.  But that's what they mean.  The actual lawsuits are of no real importance.  It's become a kind of general brand in its own right.

It's like the famous line in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence: "This is the West, Sir.  When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Love your wiring.

Are you using ribbon cable ripped into 3-wire sections?  What's the deal (and source) of that?  Very neat looking.

A great deal of these guitars were built in the same places.  Most Tokai and Grecos, for instance, were made in the same place (Tokai in Hamamatsu is probably the most famous, but Dyna Gakki and Fujigen in Matsumoto are well regarded, too) as the MIJ Fender instruments.  So the quality can be comparable--the same people were making the instruments.  But there's a lot of variation by brand and model.

I agree that the quality of these instruments is often overstated, but many of them are really nice instruments.  And the quality control on the higher quality models is correctly regarded as superior to most of what was being made in the United States at the time.  It doesn't take much effort to find some really shoddy American Fender products from the 70s.  Try to find a really bad MIJ Fender from the 70s-mid 90s period.  Seriously, it takes effort.  I don't think I've ever seen a bad one.  And some of them really are exceptionally good instruments.

Where it gets crazy is the way that some people try to pass off every single instrument that was ever made by one of these Japanese factories as a superior product.  Most of them were cheap guitars intended to be used as starter instruments.  To make a blanket statement that they're all better than USA instruments of the period is just flat wrong.  There are plenty of inferior instruments that came out of these factories because they needed to hit really low price targets.

That said, the good ones were really cheap for a long time.  This is because Japanese musicians view domestic guitars with a sense of contempt that is bottomless.  It's hard to fathom.  I mean, they really, really, really hate these guitars.  To the average Japanese player, an MIJ Fender is an embarrassment, the kind of thing you'd try to hide from your bandmates, friends and audience.  The first thing a serious player does is save up enough money for a made in the USA model.  They're incredibly sensitive to brand and status considerations.  The flip side of this was that you could walk into any music store or pawn shop and buy MIJ Fenders or lawsuit guitars for next to nothing.  When I lived there in the naughties you could buy an MIJ strat for $250.  But then they somehow caught on through internet word of mouth and now the prices are getting silly.  Your MIJ strat is a nice guitar, but it's probably not worth $1500.

Somehow the acoustics have never really caught on, which is funny.  A lot of the Yairi stuff is fantastic and you can still get them for low prices.

This cap should fit the bill.  https://www.mouser.ca/ProductDetail/EPCOS-TDK/B32529C0182K289?qs=sGAEpiMZZMv1cc3ydrPrF2KLoLLY1KZ3RBcdH39QvDM%3d

And at 41 cents, it's even cheap.

Mouser ships relatively cheaply to Canada, especially if you make a larger order.  They say free shipping above $100 CDN, but I've never personally been able to get free shipping.

As far as the pot question is concerned, you can always use a different taper and get a workable pedal.  It just makes the control a little bit less functional.  The taper is chosen to give you maximal control over the parameter.  If you go linear instead of audio, for instance, you'll probably find that the "useable" or "good sounding" part of the pot sweep is concentrated in a relatively narrow area.  In contrast, if you use the correct taper, the "good sounding" part of the sweep will be larger, making it easier to tune the pedal.

When you add SIP sockets, break off the amount you need and then stick them back on the remaining stick of sockets to space them out and make it easier to solder them in place. Once you get a couple of sockets in place, continue putting the individual sockets on the strip and then steady that strip by inserting part of it into the sockets you previously soldered to the board in order to steady it. This is a confusing thing to put in words, but there's a picture showing it in the build process article on my blog. http://prentisseffects.blogspot.com/2017/06/getting-started-build-procedure.html

That's a clever little hack.  Kudos.  Thanks for sharing it--I'm definitely going to try that one out.  Maybe I won't have to howl profanities while trying to seat a single SIL socket in place again.

I'm not generally a huge believer in this kind of thing apart from the kind of thing just mentioned (ESR, different levels of parasitics changing impedance, etc.)  But there's an interesting chart in one of Merlin Blencowe's books that gave me pause (I looked it up, it's on page 79 in Designing High-Fidelity Valve Preamps.).  Merlin measured the distortion that comes from different makes/models of film caps w/ differing construction methods and plotted distortion vs. frequency for all of them on a single graph.  It was interesting.  According to his tests, there are small but real differences in the way different types of caps distort different frequencies.  They are small, but he concludes that it is possible that those small differences could add up over the course of a circuit to be audiable.  WIMA red box films had the most distortion out of the kinds tested (kind of surprising given their more hifi reputation), and has a fair bit of 2nd harmonic distortion. 

So there you go, it's at least possible.  Although in your case you probably didn't change enough caps to make change in type add up to much, and what you're hearing is related to changes other than type (difference in value, ESR, impedance change (or placebo effect)).

Best wishes, Brian.  I hope your docs can figure it all out soon.

Another vote for the total recall.  It's got the mojo.  I'm not even exactly sure what the mojo is, but whatever it is, it's got it.

Did they throw in the ketchup packet at least?

This is unquestionably the most sparkly silverest of silver linings.

I might get into it if it didn't go head-to-head with the hockey playoffs.  And the IPL.  And baseball.  They need to push their season ahead or back by a month.  Preferably back.  Then I'd probably get converted.

Thanks Brian!

Every time I'm looking at mic pre kits and schematics I wonder how long before pedal builders jump hot and heavy on this particular train.  The pro audio world seems to be completely obsessed with them.