gibson F4 flowerpot?

[echo44]

Hi was looking around at various F4 from the early 1920's
I have noticed some have a small simple flower pot, some have a large flower pot
and some have a flower pot that looks like it has a trident on it?
In particular even instruments from the same year 1922 that have truss rod have different flower pots?

Which flowerpot is most desirable?

Thanks

[pfox14]

Gibson did vary their peghead inlays on some instruments. I would go with what you like the best.

[bingoccc]

Here are a couple of pages to look at. They runs down the I D basics for Gibson.

http://www.ceolas.org/instruments/gibson.html
http://home.provide.net/~cfh/gibson8.html

A few pictures.

http://www.mandolinarchive.com/

Congrats on the wonderful first purchase and welcome.

[Tobin]

I've been curious about this as well, having done a lot of looking at F4 photos from the late teens and early twenties. I see a lot of variation in not only the style of flowerpots, but even some of the small details. Some have the trident style design on the side of the pot, some have a different variation (this one (http://www.mandolinarchive.com/gibson/serial/70199) has the dots separated from the arms of the trident-thingy, which seems strange). I don't know enough to be able to discern a pattern, if there even is one. It's possible that whoever was doing inlays may have just put some artistic variation into his work as the mood struck him. Or maybe the orders were specific for what inlay variations the customers wanted. Heck, it may have just been poor quality control. I don't know, but it's fairly interesting. Some of the flowerpots are well done, some are very sloppy and crooked, with misaligned parts. This was all hand-work back then, of course, so it's to be expected.

The only pattern I seem to see (and there are probably exceptions) is that the single flowerpots don't tend to have the trident on the side of the pot, where the double flowerpots do.

One thing I find awkward is the truss-rod models which seem to have been an afterthought, where the truss rod cover obscures most of the lower portion of the inlay. My guess is that they already had a bunch of peghead veneers done and inlaid already, and just had to use them up despite the fact that the new truss rod upgrade was going to ruin the flow of the inlay pattern. I don't know if this was an intentional thing, or just something they had to do for budget/cost reasons during the transition to truss rods.