Need help identifing Elk model and year

[JV Music]

Just recently aquired this Elk guitar, but have not been able to find any info on it at all. Anybody know the model and possible year? Serial number is 0018.

[VintAxe]

Hi JV Music.

So far I haven't been able to learn much about ELK. Best I can tell their main years of production were from 1965-1975. I think they primarily aimed at the domestic Japanese market although they were exported to the US.

All of the guitars of theirs that I've seen have been loosely interpreted copies of American designs, mostly Fender and Gibson models. Your guitar appears to be Mosrite copy.

There are a couple of ELK catalogs uploaded here, but your guitar isn't pictured:



I can't tell much from your photos concerning hardware etc because they are so small. It appears you have linked to the thumbnails rather than the actual photos. If you can link to larger pictures I might be able to make educated guesses based on hardware. It would also be useful to have a clear picture of the logo.

[JV Music]

Thanks for your reply. I was wondering why the pictures were smaller than all the ones I've seen on here! I have resubmitted them.
The logo on the headstock is pretty worn.

[VintAxe]

Yeah, that logo is worn but at least we can see it is a script logo. ELK used script logos in the 1960's and then switched to block logos in the early 1970's. Unfortunately, they appear to have returned to script logos in the mid 1970's.

At least we can begin with the hypothesis that it wasn't made in the early 1970s. I'll take a closer look when I get a little time and report back what I see.

[Michael Ambrose]

You know, its funny. I've been wondering about Elk for a long time... On ebay a few months back I came upon an elk amp that looks like a dead-on ringer for a blackface Bandmaster... and this Mos looks pretty solid... complete with a plate tremolo?

Man, I'd love to find out the deal with this company.

[Spud1950]

Another mysterious company. From what I did find, the company was named Elk Gakki Co. Ltd. Their guitars are consider very decent mid quality guitars,mostly copies of popular American brands.No info as to whether they actually manufactured guitars or not.They did indeed have a line of amps that were pretty much Fender clones.

Edit- Just stumbled on another tidbit of info.

"Elk was a Japanese manufacturer (Miyuki Ind. Co.) who started out in 1953 making amplifiers inspired by the Fender amplifiers of the day. The original brand name was Echo. In the early 60's Miyuki started making pro quality guitars under the brand name of Elk and changed the brand name of the amplifiers to Elk as well. The brand probably stopped in the early 1980's.

Miyuki also used the Luxor and Royal brand names for their amps in Europe.

In 1969 there was a big fire in the factory, burning many amps and guitars. Quite a shock for the people who worked there.

It seems that the later Elk amps had solid state preamps and tube power amps."

Now that there's bigger pictures, I'm seeing that the guitar seems to be of very nice quality workmanship.The vibrato/bridge looks to be of much better quality then typical of other Japanese Mosrite clones I've seen. Pickups look good too.I like it alot. How does it sound and play?

[JV Music]