Silvertone 367 Archtop
The Rise of the Phoenix
This was a Marketplace find. Good looking guitar but ordinarily I don’t get too excited by the Harmony/Kay stuff from the 60’s, they’re funky but usually don’t grab me with the way they sound and play. This one was an interesting story because it had been in a house fire, but what piqued my interest was something that wasn’t shown on the guitar and was kind of buried in the listing: a pick guard with two single coil pickups. Two single coil pickups from this era could be fun to mess with and would add to the mojo on this one.
It’s about 45 minutes away so before I fully commit I do a little more digging on the guitar and the pickups. The guitar could be anything – Silvertone was the house brand for Sears and lots of companies made these guitars over a number of years. Without numbers its hard to know anything, and even then it can be a challenge. I did a reverse image lookup and found one at Jake Wildwood & Co. guitars. It’s not the same but close, has the same bolt-on neck so we’re in the ballpark. He’s got a video of someone playing it, and its about what I was expecting – a little harsh but not awful either, sounds kind of good fingerstyle. He says his is late 60’s early 70’s in Kay’s last years of production, indicated by the bolt-on neck. I’ll go with that for the moment.
So now I start research on the pick guard. I don’t find an exact match, but do find eBay and Reverb listings for an aftermarket item from Kent that’s pretty close, as close as I may get with this. There was very little standardization on the Japanese guitars and pickups from this era, so variations are not surprising. Also good to get a look at what my missing mounting hardware and knobs looked like.
This might add some value to the package, but of course he doesn’t know anything about the pickups or if they work, so it’s a roll of the dice. But fixed up and working, the guitar with the pickups would be pretty cool. The listing says it needs work, and as I say these aren’t great guitars so I don’t really want to pay a lot for it. Then I remember I have a Pignose strat that I picked up for very little and cleaned up. It’s just a basic entry level guitar, nice but I don’t play it, so I offer that in trade and he says “deal”.
I go to meet him, its about a 45 minute drive. Nice guy but when I see the guitar I realize I may have made a big mistake, its kind of a mess. The top is sort of cattywampus, one side seems to be a little caved in…can’t tell what’s going on but whatever it is that’s not good. The headstock veneer is pretty chewed up and someone did some exploratory surgery to find the end of the truss rod, the bridge is a replacement and not correct, the nut is on with hot glue, and there’s various delaminations going on. I take a look at the pick guard, hoping that might save the day but it’s pretty rough as well – missing a pot and someone has tried to wire in a 5-way switch, curiouser and curiouser. In a different situation I might have called it off, but something tells me to go ahead with it. I don’t play the Pignose and figure I may be able to learn something from the archtop, so we swap guitars.
On the way home I’m kind of bummed but I’ve generally had good luck on these marketplace deals so figure I was bound to have a clunker. But at least the other guy got a good guitar, and if I can get the pick guard working that might salvage the whole thing.
Back Home
When I get back home I put the guitar in the garage and take the pick guard down to the shop, put it on a shelf and start to forget about them. But a little later in the evening I grab the guitar and take it to the shop, open it up and take a look.
It’s definitely rough, but one of the first things I notice in better light is the finish. Its a warm sunburst color scheme with the classic checked clear coat that people are trying to replicate now, because it looks so cool…and it does. The top is flattened out on the bass side but seems stable. There’s a crack but its in the top lamination of the plywood, not all the way through. The neck is rough but one of the things I noticed about this in the listing is that it’s a bolt-on neck, which makes the neck MUCH easier to deal with. The neck binding is gone, there’s a pretty good bow in it, and something has happened to the head stock veneer that I haven’t seen before. There is evidence of a truss rod cover but that doesn’t mean there’s actually a truss rod in there. On this type of guitar from this era sometimes the truss rod covers were just for show. I can’t see the end of the truss rod, but someone else tried really hard to find it by excavating the immediate area. Worst case it gets a new truss rod and fret board, not the end of the world. So it needs a bunch of work but it might be fun to try to salvage it. The clouds are lifting a bit.
Then I take a look at the pick guard. Someone attempted to wire it without really knowing what they were doing, but as long as the pickups are intact that part is easily remedied. Three pots, or there should be: master tone and individual volume controls. From further research these look similar to Kent WC-25 pickups, but I couldn’t find anything with the “Conquerer” brand so definitive lineage will remain a mystery for now.
At this point I decide to take the neck and the hardware off and see what’s what.
It’s a mess but sort of a lovable mess. Nothing too crazy yet but I need more info on the top. As I’m going over it I notice that the tap tones are different on the treble and bass sides…which probably means a sprung brace. I do have an endoscope but I can never get it to work, so I feel around as much as I can and become pretty sure that this is the case. And that means the back has to come off – a new adventure!
First step is to get the binding off so I can get at the back seam. I’m expecting this to crumble off in pieces but to my surprise I’m able to pry it off using an Xacto knife blade. Wasn’t thinking I’d be able to reuse it so it’s nice to have that option.
Back off
This gives me access to the back joint, so now I have to figure out how to get it apart. The basic approach is to use heat of some sort to loosen the glue, insert something thin, and then pry to separate the pieces. Usually there’s a spot to start on an older guitar, and on this one the area under the tailpiece is loose enough to get something in there. I watch a few videos and try a few things, then realize that I’m going to need some specialized equipment. So I buy a spatula and a heated knife on Amazon.
This all goes pretty well. I’m doing a little more cutting than heating with the hot knife but live and learn, right? And then I hit the neck block. Its bigger than normal due to the bolt on neck configuration, so getting it loose is going to take some time. However, with most of the back loose I can get a look inside and confirm the sprung brace.
It took me a while to get the back loose from the neck block. I was using a heated spatula and basically it just take time to get the joint warmed up to the point that you can make progress. This took a few sessions but finally got there.
Finally the back is off! And now I get a good look at the brace. I can force it back into place but it shouldn’t take that much force – actually it shouldn’t take any force, it should just fit the curve of the top. So now I’m starting to wonder if the heat from the fire has something to do with this. I’ve kind of been thinking all along that this guitar was a victim of smoke inhalation but not actually exposed to flames or intense heat, but I might be wrong on that. The inside of the back is very dark as you can see, so I’m wondering if the plywood top got hot enough to soften the glue and flatten out on the bass side? Not sure at the moment but thinking the solution will probably involve some sort of attempt to heat the area enough to relieve some of the existing tension so that when I do glue the brace back it will have a good chance of staying glued.
Tucking that problem into the Cogitator I turn my attention to the pick guard and pickups.
Le Resistance
The way the PO talked about the pick guard made me think it didn’t come with the guitar, it sounded like someone had found it and thought it would be cool to add to it at some point. He kind of dismissed it as not being worth mentioning, and after seeing the wiring its very possible that he thought the pickups didn’t work, in which case, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning. But as I was messing with it I noticed that there are holes on the top that line up perfectly with the pick guard, and the holes are not new, so it appears that this pick guard had been on this guitar for quite a while. Very interesting to discover that these two go together; not from the factory of course but maybe not long after. I wasn’t expecting that but really like the idea that now I’m restoring this as one piece instead of two, very fun development.
At this point its time to check the pickups for signs of life. These things have a very basic wiring structure, the coil goes to the power and anything metal in the vicinity is grounded. So you grab your handy dandy multi-meter and look for the hot lead and ground coming from the pickup. And when I do this I find that the pickup leads have basically disintegrated inside the insulation.
So this requires more exploratory surgery. I’m kinda curious anyway but very cautious because everything is so old. I remove one cover and then the decorative paper, to find a coil wrapped in…paper? Seems unusual but I don’t have a ton of experience with these things. I have one Japanese guitar with gold foil pickups, a Zenon Audition, which I rewired but never had to get this far into the pickups. A little more research indicates that these may be “air coils”, i.e. the don’t have a bobbin (or central structure) around which the coil is wrapped. But since I don’t really want to disturb the paper wrapping if I can avoid it, that will remain conjecture for now.
The gray wire entering at the top right is the issue, its contents have pretty much dissolved. You can see a wire coming off the coil and headed that direction. But I’m not sure what the thing on the right side of the coil is? I carefully pry the coil out and discover that its a flexible plastic tube, like the model airplane fuel lines of my youth. Looks like it serves as an insulator and a spacer, pretty ingenious.
At this point I try to get a reading from the multi-meter but can’t get anything definitive, so have to keep going. A closer look shows three leads coming from the coil, two on the left and one at the right, all insulated with extremely fine thread or cloth. So these would theoretically be 1) the start of the coil, 2) the end of the coil, and 3) the ground? I’m not really sure. At this point I pick up the plastic tube and gently pull it off the wires.
With the plastic tube off I can get to the soldered connections. I release them with the soldering iron and am very excited to get a good reading on the multi-meter. Rinse and repeat on the other one and they’re both intact – whew.
Back to the Brace
So The Cogitator has been hard at work in the background and provided us with a few ideas. I could just muscle the brace back into place but there’s a fair amount of push back from the top, so much so that I’m leery of it popping again. The other issue is, what do I used for a mold when I glue it? I don’t have clamps with enough depth and reach to just clamp it, so was going to use the go-bar deck, but in order to do that it would be very helpful to have a female mold into which to clamp the brace. I do have a radius dish, and as The Cogitator has noticed, I also have a lightweight mold in the form of the back of the guitar, which is the same profile as the top. I play around with this idea and it seems to have a good probability of getting a workable result – this is not a museum piece so I’m trying to limit scope creep.
The first thing to try is to get some heat on it to see if I can soften things up enough to release some of the tension. I decide to use a halogen lamp instead of a heat gun for the first attempt – heat guns are pretty aggressive and this guitar doesn’t need anymore fire! I want to get the area around the brace thoroughly warmed and the halogen lamp might not be as hot as the heat gun but will certainly get it started.
