Toby Mar-Hiti Mug, Real or Fake?

Over the weekend I won 2 toby designs Toby Mar-Hiti Tall Tiki Mug on Ebay, at one glance they are the same, but under further inspection, I noticed one was larger then the other by a quarter of an inch. Under more inspection I also noticed that one was alot smoother then the other. My question to the Tiki Comunity is, does the mold imprint lessons after use, is it a different mold, is it a reproduction and how long and when did they make this design? Looking at the Toby Design in the Book of tiki, the wood grain look is very present, where as the one I have even though you can see the lines, you can't feel them.

..without pics of said mugs it's hard to say, but any mold, regardless of material that the mold is made from, has a life span....you can only pull so many castings from a mold before the mold deterioates and you begin to lose details after each successive pull...at which time, a new mold must be nade to continue castings.....probably why in limited editions, the earlier #'s are more highly coveted as these contain the most detail from the mold...-also, shrinkage does occur when you cast anything at all...depends on materials and such, but you will always get a small percentage of shrink. by the sounds of the shrink on the one mug, i'll bet someone made a casting off an original mug..which means you probably have one original and one imposter.....

The one on the left hand side is taller and you can feel the texture. The one on the right hand side is smaller and smooth as a babys bottom. These picture are not that great, but are pretty acurate to what they look like in person. They both have Toby Designs on the bottom, althought the one on the right is faint.

if they both say toby designs, chances are that they are both original. the crappy one is probably one of the last ones cast from a particular mold.....I doubt that someone is forging these, because it's not exactly the rarest nor the most appealing design. if someone was going to forge a mug, I would hope that at least her or she had brains enough to forge one that is going to bring in the most bucks on ebay, like the francoma war god or some other rare item. There are glazes available that can fake the look of crazing and other sorts of wear.......I would be very suprised if the one you had was fake. however, folks into making their own home ceramics back in the day could very well have made a mold from an original toby mug to create more mugs for themselves, in which case, the mug is still vintage, just not original....who knows??

Thanks Tipsy, I really apreaciate a second opinion. I was curious about the wear on molds. Now I need to find out what years the Mar-Hiti Tiki were in production.

[ Edited by: unklefun 2006-05-16 14:24 ]