My always fuzzy memory says Guild did not use any three letter prefixes on made in America instruments. I'd love to see the label.
Possibilities include:
- The label was not read properly
- The instrument was liquidated or refurbished and the Guild serial was replaced with another one so that there was clearly no warranty liability.
- It is not a made in USA F512 but it is "legitimate" Guild.
- It says Guild but was not licensed by the company we know of as Guild Guitars.
And if there were three character prefixes then the C suggests Corona and thus 2002-2005 plus or minus a few months.
Yeah, Corona used 3 letter prefixes on at least some models, and all their (regular production) prefixes started with "C".
Looking to purchase a used guild F512 string guitar. The seller did not know the date of the build but gave me a serial number. But the serial number looks weird. Can anyone decipher the build date from this? CUP00268
Corona numbers were simply issued in serial for each model, no date embedded in the number, but that's a pretty high number for a 12 so I'm saying yeah, '03-'04, Hans will know for sure.
Corona's first official production year was '02 (Westerly was still shipping right up through November of '01 but they stopped new builds in August IIRC) and they were packing up for the move to Tacoma by late '04 (Seem to recall July '04 as official end of production?)
letstalkguild.com