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  • in reply to: Guitar ID: 1950 Kay Truetone Speed Demon? (pic) #76894
    stringz
    Member

    It has the famous Kay “tissue box” pickups, but what seems out of place is the cutaway “horn”. All of the Speed Demons I have seen, including the private label models, have a pointed cutaway horn like what is found on the Gibson ES 175. Yours is more rounded. A lot of stores would make special requests to make their model different from competing stores models, so that’s probably what happened. In all other respects it does appear to be a Speed Demon private label of some sort, I’m just not sure who might have specified a reshaping of the horn.

    in reply to: What type of harmony guitar is this? #79842
    stringz
    Member

    OK, did a little research. Yours says est. 1892 on the headstock, so that makes it an import. Harmony only started using that when they moved production outside the USA. You really need to find out EXACTLY how old it is and where it was made to determine whether it is worth fixing up. The quality of the guitars made in Asia varies greatly from one country to the next. Japan made guitars from about the mid-late 60’s made great strides catching up to the USA factories. Korea, Taiwan and China wouldn’t start to catch up until much later, and in some cases still haven’t caught up unless they are making guitars for the bigger USA companies which demand stricter quality control. I have a Harmony strat here and the model number ends in the letter “T”, which means Taiwan. It’s a 1990’s model and not bad. It’s better than a Fender Made in Mexico, IMO. If you can find a model number somewhere on it, that might help.

    Still, even if it’s not worth restoring, it might make a good base for a project guitar. The body shape is not your usual Fender/Gibson clone, so it has potential to be made into something really unique.

    in reply to: What type of harmony guitar is this? #79833
    stringz
    Member

    Everything you ever wanted to know about USA built Harmony guitars can be found here.

    http://harmony.demont.net/

    Sorry, no info here about Harmony imports, if that’s what you have.

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