My GF85

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Vintage Goldstar banjo Owners Lovers

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Folks who own enjoy 1970's 1980's Goldstar banjos

136 Members, Created 1/27/2011 -

Administrators: jason holgate (owner)

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From Connorsbasement on 11/19/2015 9:52:16 PM

I'm new to this site and I mostly play fiddle but a couple years ago now my grandpa gave me his old banjo that had been sitting in his attic for several years. I've been slowly working on restoring it and getting various parts and things fixed, tuned up, etc as I learn more about the instrument and how to play and treat it. I just found out that on Gold Star's serial numbers, the first two digits are the year it was made which would make this a 1981 GF85. Does anyone know what the other four didgits mean? The banjo has all origional parts except for the nut and one of the nuts that holds one of the rods that goes through the resonator. The headstock broke off so I had to get the nut replaced and the headstock glued back on. I had a few of the top frets filed, the neck reset and the string action lowered. I also had railroad spikes put in for A, Bb, B and C on the 5th string. I've also gotten the head tightened a few times. It has a not compinsated Grover Bridge that's maple and ebony which I assume came with the Banjo. I also found two partial sets of unused Vega Banjo strings (they're in the old dark and light brown packaging and I have the 2nd, 3rd and 4th strings of both sets of v700s, I don't know what happened to the 1st and 5th strings). I've tried a bunch of different strings on it. When I first got it, it had a super old set of the vega strings which I left on while I was starting out. Since then I've been going back and forth between D'addario Nickel, D'addario Stainless steel and GHS Stainless steel strings. I tried the new Martin Vegas for awhile and I had a set of D'addario phospher bronze strings on for about five minutes.

1 Comments
	Toshi Tsuchida says: 9/6/2017 6:21:18 AM Sorry for late reply! Regarding serial #, first two digits are the year it was built as you mention and other four digit are the order from first one of the year. Tokai musicai instruments built your banjo in 1981 and yours is the ####th. They built many kinds of banjos such as Gold Star GF85,GF100,G20JD,G11,G12,Tokai T-1200R,T-850R,T-600R,T-450R but stamped serial # in series no matter what model it was. For example the Gold Star JD Crowe model has 78 gaps between the first and the last #, so people believe 80 were built but the day they built JD model they also built other models, so acutual production quantity might have been much smaller.
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