by Spud1950 » Sat Jul 16, 2011 7:13 pm
It is a Kay made guitar. Very nice condition! The N1 is not of any help. Almost all Kay's of many different decades have N1,N2,N3 or N4 stamped somewhere on them. The number is not date specific and no one seems know exactly what they mean. The L504 would more likely be model number rather then anything specific to a particular date. Kay really never used any sort of sequential serial number system.Dating them is pretty much left up to finding the model in a catalog, which a lot of times only gives a date range rather then a specific year as so many models appear over the coarse of many years. One good clue on yours is the headstock shape. This specific Kay headstock shape first shows up on some models around sometime in the later 1950s. I will look in the Kay catalogs in the VintAxe collection and see what I can find.
Edit- Here's what I found.There is no model exactly like yours in the Kay catalogs. There is a very similar model that appears in the 1956 and 1959 editions. It's listed as a k1-5 in 56 and k899015 in 59.Although the model numbers are different,it is exactly the same in appearance and written desciption for both years. There is no 1957 or 1958 catalog available. The differences from yours are that this model has block inlays on the fretboard, a slightly different tail piece, same exact pick guard shape but without any sort of emblem on it and the older style headstock shape. Body and finish is exactly the same as yours. Also,from the 1960 catalog onward, there are no single cutaway arch top acoustic models shown so I would have to say yours is mid to late 1950s. Being unbranded,it was most likely a model that Kay supplied to a mail order catalog outfit or department store chain and has no exact equivalent in the official Kay branded model line. Oh yeah,a Kay model like yours of this era would have "steel reinforced neck", basically the term for a non adjustable truss rod. No indication of what the neck is made of.