About

About Vintage Fret

Vintage Fret reads the serial number of a vintage guitar, ukulele, banjo or mandolin and returns a date range, with a word for how far to trust it. It runs in your browser against a fixed set of rules written down in plain data.

Unofficial. Not affiliated with or endorsed by any manufacturer. Brand names appear as plain text only, to say which maker a rule belongs to.

How a reading is made

Your number is tested against every format in the data for the brand you chose, or every brand if you chose none. Each format that fits gives a reading. Readings that conflict with a pot code or an instrument family you entered are ruled out, and stay listed with the reason. Where several ambiguous readings overlap, a red bracket joins them and names the span.

What the confidence words mean

• Exact: the rule gives a single year.
• Likely: one rule fits, with some doubt about its edges.
• Ambiguous: a span, or more than one rule, fits.
• Cannot tell: the format carries no year.

"Estimated" marks a boundary that comes from collector consensus, not a factory record. Treat estimated edges as soft.

What it will not do

No valuations. No claims about whether an instrument is genuine or original. A serial is evidence, not proof. See what a serial cannot tell you.

Known gaps

• Pot codes 134 (Stackpole), 140 (Clarostat) and 328 (Switchcraft) are reported by collectors and not yet checked against the EIA list. Allen-Bradley 109 is unverified.
• Fender 1950 to 1964 bands, Gibson 1961 to 1972, Gretsch, and Epiphone before 1990 each need a second source.
• Danelectro and Harmony model tables are not built.
• Martin ukulele, mandolin, LX and Backpacker charts are not included.
• Rickenbacker 1997 to 1998 and Fender N and MN prefixes need verification.

Corrections are not yet routed anywhere public. Until that changes, treat the data as a working draft and check important results elsewhere.

Privacy

Nothing is collected. Serial numbers you type are processed in your browser and are not sent anywhere. The site sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads no third-party scripts. Your entries are kept in the address bar after a hash so you can bookmark or share a result, and that part of an address is not sent to the server.

The site is hosted on Cloudflare, which, like any host, counts requests to its servers.