Mama warned me about archtops ….. so I was instantly drawn to them.
There’s something about old “department store” guitars that makes them special. Kay, Harmony, Silvertone, SS Stewart … the list goes on. Many of these guitars were specially made for department stores. Sears , Montgomery Ward, etc., and just the ticket for Junior on Christmas morning. Their quality isn’t top shelf. Hey these were what you bought if you couldn’t afford a Gibson or a Martin …. or a Guild or a Gretsch … or even a Richenbacher or a Hagstrom …. and truthfully they’re more appropriately categorized as “bottom shelf” …. or dumpster! I’ll be damned if some aren’t still surviving, and occasionally sounding halfway decent some 80 years down the road.
But damn, they are cool…
A couple of years ago I was perusing guitars on eBay, a dangerous habit I have, when I saw a late ‘50’s Kay archtop for $92. It was in tough shape, truly just a “husk” of a guitar. It had a neck, a body, and a tailpiece. No frets, no tuners, no pick guard, no bridge, half the fret marker inlays were missing, there was a chunk of wood missing from the end of the fingerboard ….
It was just what l was looking for.
This was a guitar that I could rebuild from the ground up as a learning exercise, and it would be okay if it got trashed in the process …. but it didn’t.
I started by removing the neck and cutting a “swoop” in the fingerboard. I was so happy with the results that I vowed to do that with all my new guitars. It looked really cool. I sanded the fingerboard to remove pitting, installed missing fret marker dots, oiled it, and installed nice fat brass frets, painted the neck with black nitrocellulose lacquer, and polished meticulously.
I restored the Kay headstock as best as I could and installed period specific, knock off, Chinese made tuners. They work!
I began hours of buffing and polishing, filling imperfections with colored CA glue, using microfiber abrasives to make the finish sparkle. I painted the “bindings” (they’re painted on these guitars), installed an end pin, and cut the pickup slots out. I applied several coats of clear nitrocellulose lacquer and polished, polished, buffed, and polished some more.
I installed a period appropriate, nifty, Kay pickguard and a couple of crummy Korean pickups … which are perfect for this guitar!
Cutting holes for the volume and tone controls and the jack for the patch cord. Installing the pickups.
I re-installed the neck, threw some strings on it, and fixed the action as much as I could. Kay necks are sometimes referred to as baseball bat necks, you could hit a fastball a long way with one of these babies.
I fired up my 1958 restored Kay archtop guitar and it sounded beautiful!!
I sold it on eBay for $550. A nifty little profit, but I almost wished I had kept it, but a man can only have so many archtops (I have a few). It was a really fun guitar and I put a lot into it, and I learned a ton in the process.
It really turned out to be a real nice funky piece of work.
Rock on Junior. Merry Christmas!!!
Wimberly Guitar & Luthiery 