How many colors of Mots lap steels are there?

[Dennis Smith]

This purple one on Ebay made me wonder how many colors did the mots come in.

[Noah Miller]

Dozens, probably. I've seen ten different shades between white, beige and yellow alone. The covering wasn't originally intended for steels & amps; manufacturers just bought whatever was already available.

[John Dahms]

Depending on the year the shades change. Kind of like siding or shingles for a house, depending on what tones were hot at the time.
In the 30's it was considered a high-end material to add to guitars but ten years later only cheap models displayed MOTS.

[Stephen Dorocke]

In the 90's, I used to work for a company in Chicago as a builder of Chemnitzer concertinas.. here's one that I built. At the time, we had 5 colors. Dark blue, light blue, green, red, and white. We sourced this material from Italy, but now it's all made in China, to the best of my knowledge... I became an expert working with this material.. very nasty>>

http://www.celluloid.com.cn/Pearl_Series.asp

[Doug Beaumier]

Fender made a few of these Blue MOTS Champions back in the early 50s. I wish they had made more!



Most of them were blonde.



BTW, MOTS can fade or change slightly in color over the years. If you remove the control plate or the bridge plate from a MOTS guitar you'll notice that the MOTS under those parts is usually brighter and lighter than the rest of the MOTS on the guitar. Sometimes it's even a different shade (the original shade).

[Dennis Smith]

Thanks Guys. I didn't realize that mots went back to the 30's. I also didn't think about the color fading.
John, nice collection there.
Doug the blue Fender is new to me.
Here's a nice Oahu set on Ebay from 1941, but the price is WAY UP THERE.

[Andy Volk]

Moderator Brad Bechtel posted this illuminating info here in 2001 .....

Mother Of Toilet Seat" (MOTS) is the humorous nickname given to the plastic like decorations, inlays and overlays found on many high end and some low end instruments from the 20s and later. The name MOTS derives from the substitution of the material for Mother-Of-Pearl and Abalone. Ivoroid and "Mother of toilet seat" are the same chemically (they are both made by dissolving short cotton fibers in nitric acid, and forming the resulting cellulose nitrate into soft sheets that can then be colored or patterned in various methods to resemble tortoise shell, ivory, or mother-of-pearl.) but the manufacturing process beyond the initial chemical engineering differs. MOTS is made by mixing fish scales (yes, fish scales) and previously hardened blocks of fish-scale celluloid into a mass of soft celluloid, forming it into a block, allowing it to harden, and slicing sheets from the block. Ivoroid is made by interleaving thin sheets of white and clear celluloid, allowing the block to harden, and slicing or cutting sheets and chunks at right angles to the laminations. "Tortoise shell" colored celluloid (picks and pickguards) is made by pressing hardened chunks of brown celluloid into a soft mass of clear celluloid, allowing the mass to harden, and slicing sheets from the block. So, yes, they all have the same chemical origins, but the manufacturing process for each differs somewhat. Dupont patented a process and called the resulting product Pyralin. It was used on Vegas and Gibsons as well as other brands of instruments.

[Jack Aldrich]

I've also heard of pyrolin called MOCH - Mother of Clothes Hamper. Bacon and Day did some incredible banjos back in the 30's. I own a B&D Senorita - white peghead with red etched "Sennorita", resonator brown on edges fading to white in center, same for sides. It plays and sounds great, btw. the great old time banjo virtuoso, Wade Ward, had a Gibson trapdoor banjo with a olive green pyrolin fretboard. Way too cool!