stanger says:
5/7/2013 2:48:32 AM

The short answer is no. When Chuck sold to Baldwin, Baldwin got all his records at the time of sale along with everything else. And when Baldwin went bankrupt, all the records were lost.
It's possible they may exist, stuffed away in a pile of Baldwin documents or in the hands of a former employee, but with each passing year, the chances of anything showing up dims.

Ed Britt spent a lot of time for about 5 years building a data base which includes serial number, banjo particulars, and date of sale/manufacture, and a few of us and I contributed all we could to it, but it still has a lot of big holes.
Their serial system under Chuck was sequential, but gave no indication of banjo type, model, or anything else other than the style number. Baldwin continued to use it until ca. 1971, but seems to have modified it, and when they did, Baldwin left a 1000 number gap in the sequence. Shortly after 71, they went to the system they used until the end.

The paper labeled banjo serial system has more info as to what the banjo is, but it doesn't say how many were made over a year's production. We could only guess. All the system gives us is the number made in a month, and even that is sketchy.

All Ed can do is make educated guesses much of the time. While some of the years were fruitful for his database, others were not, especially the years around the factory fires. 1974-76 are particularly sparse.

Those years were the time when a lot of details, such as the peghead shape and proportions, got real wobbly and the production seems to have been very low. The banjos made then still were to spec, but neither of us have dug up very many.

He's been quite busy the past 2-3 years doing other stuff, and I don't know how the database work is progressing at present.

Gibson Mastertone RB-800 1980
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