I am certain this is toward the end of the Star days as they (St Louis Music Supply and the other major importers) would more than likely have been trying to ramp up for a seamless transition from Star to Pearl. If you look at the ads, the overall design and style just says "early 70s" to me. They would have had to almost certainly engaged in this practice and with the blessings of both manufacturers because when Star ended production, they pretty much exited the stencil segment altogether in order to concentrate their afforts on the ermerging TAMA brand. This would be in order to avoid any confusion of cross contaminating drum sets and/or names. TAMA has, as far as we know, resisted temptation to participate in stenciling, unless they own some of the production facilities in China and the Phillipines and Taiwan and make sure to avoid detection. Pearl is and has always been blatant as far as making no differentiation between any of the lower end Taiwan stuff in order to control costs by minimizing options as far as hardware goes.

*EDIT*

In the statement above, I deleted/edited the wording in bold from "TAMA has not, as far as we know" to it's current wording. Sorry for the miss information...

"Battleship"-that's good.I called them "Dixie" which only I can relate to,since I bought a pair of Dixie badged toms for my first Kent set that had those lugs.All in favor of "Battleship"......

Yeah, I have little names for the stencil lug styles: 'Battleship' for the flat top steam iron looking ones by Pearl; 'Disco Ball' for the Pearl President lugs; 'Teardrop' for the Sonor copies by Star; 'Shark Tooth' for the wider and longer lugs on Hoshino sets; 'Fat Sling copy' for the wide Pearl Slingerland lug copies, and 'Thin Sling copy' for the Star thin ridge top Slingerland lug copies.

That seems to be most of them that we see. I guess you could call the center lugs on the earlier Pearls (like Crowns) 'Clamshells.' And there is also a sort of 'Ribbed Battleship' too. (And Gretsch copies and 'Silver Bar' lugs, etc etc etc.)

The Pearl rectangle lugs with the line in the middle that they went to in the 70's I just call 'Pearl crap.' Even though I have a Pearl snare from this period I really like, that sounds really good, I just kind of dislike those lugs as they were put on every piece of MIT junk for the past 25 years. They are pretty thin pot metal and break fairly easily.

John, yes, the ad looks very 70s so I think you're right on about the 'seamless' transition from Star to Pearl. I just think it was pretty transparent to have them in the same catalog. They couldn't offer an updated or ammended catalog a few months later? Not cost effective? I think I was just pointing this out to kind of show why it is that there can be some confusion sometimes identifying what is what, although I think that collectivelly, we as a team have gotten much better at it over the last several months!

***eye twiyching uncontrollably***

......details....damned details.............what the hell is wrong with people.....can't they leave well enough alone.....details....

Wow! Very good sleuthing SherlockFYI I hadn`t noticed that before and if you just look as you`ve pointed out- it`s very obvious. It`s enough to make us all goEye Ball

After this I think we all have jumped up one new level in the MIJ identification game. Thanks!