Help finding maker of guitar

[cosmo]

[img]
http://s918.photobucket.com/albums/ad21 ... vesGuitar/

Hi everyone. If you can see the pics at that website.....could you please
tell me your opinion of what kind of guitar that is in the picture, if you can see it. We were wondering if it was a Mosrite, but really haven't the foggiest!
It is from at least as far back as mid sixties, or further.
Happy Holidays. (sorry,..don't know much about uploading images to forums., if it didn't come out.)

[Spud1950]

Don't know what it is yet,but it's definately not a Mosrite. Body,headstock pickups and other things just don't add up to Mosrite.Also,your guitar has a Bigsby vibrato and bridge. Mosrite never used those.They had their own very distinguishable patented vibrato and bridge design. There's something really familiar about that guitar,but it's just not clicking right now. I'll keep lookng.

[cosmo]

Hey, thanks for your reply. Please keep me posted if you might get some insights on the brand of this guitar. I guess the most distinctive thing about it is those sort of large dots on the fretboard that are inlays. Cheers.

[Spud1950]

[cosmo]

It plays and sounds nice, and the pickups are pretty hot.
I'm not sure if the pickups are original or not. It is a
bandmate's guitar, and I told him I'd try to find out what
kind it is for him since he doesn't have internet connection.
He said he had it all apart and still couldn't find out
what kind it was. I don't think they had no-name asian
guitars back then, so I would guess that it is US made.
The tuners look exactly like the tuners on the old stratocasters,
sort of silvery and sort of small knobs. I don't know if the
bigsby is original or not, but I suppose that it is.

[Michael Ambrose]

Those big 'ol dot markers and that little tab on the headstock remind me of something perhaps Eastern-European in origin...

[cosmo]

That would be interesting if it were of E. European origin, as that area was behind the iron curtain during the 60's with the cold war and all, and I don't think anything sold in the US would have come from there then, since there was probably some kind of trade embargo, like with cuba nowadays. It could be a black market guitar!

[Michael Ambrose]

Not necessarily... Hofner and Hagstrom guitars, for example, are quite common.

[Spud1950]

Sweden is not a an eastern European country,so Hagstroms are not in that catagory.

[Michael Ambrose]

Wow, I've got to stop trying to do Geography before bed hahaha...

[cosmo]

Interesting....I thought those companies were from west germany or sweden or somewhere like that. Maybe it's a russian made guitar.

[cosmo]

I know there are amps from russia called Sovtek amps, but I don't know when they started selling in the US, and I don't know if they made guitars either. I also don't know if they were made back in the cold war days.

[cheepaxes]

Sovtek amps didn't show up in the US until the '90s. Around the same time there were other products from former-Soviet Union showing up in the US, like Electro-Harmonix boxes, Red Bear amps and Sovtek and Svetlana tubes. Prior to that the only product from the USSR I can remember seeing around was Stolichnaya. Even that was unavailable in the US until some time in the late '70s or early '80s (IIRC). The first bottle of it I ever saw was in the mid-'70s when my dad brought some home from a joint US-Soviet symposium on traffic safety.

-Scott

[Spud1950]

The Soviet Russians and other eastern bloc commie countries made electric guitars starting in the 1960s. For the most part,these guitars are crap.Poorly made,hard to play and not very good sounding. This guitar looks to be of much better quality then those pieces of junk. Also, you wouldn't find one of those equipped with an American made and somewhat expensive Bigsby vibrato and bridge.Although it may very well be of European origin, this guitar just doesn't fit the commie guitar catagory.Here's a web site dedicatd to the guitars made in the former Soviet bloc countries.



On the hunch that it might be a European made guitar of other origin,I'm going to send an email to Jack Marchal at Fetish Guitars and see what he thinks it might be. Another possibility is that it's a modified guitar, not in it's original state.

[cosmo]

XLNT, ... that would be fabulous if that person might know something about the origins of this guitar. Thanks for forwarding that.

I don't think it is a cheap guitar, simply because it has a nice nut on the tuner end of the fretboard, whereas cheap guitars seem to have just a larger fret there that would act as a nut. That, and like you said, the bigsby,...I don't think anyone would bother putting a nice bigsby on a throwaway guitar.