c.1947 Oahu by Harmony H1190 Guitar

This guitar has looks, tone, and style. It's stamped S-47 (Spring/Summer 1947) inside, and unlike most of Oahu's fare (which was usually made by Kay in Chicago) this guitar was made by Harmony for them. Its model number is "H1190" and the guitar roughly corresponds to some of the fancier Harmony "Grand Concert" models at the time (this is also roughly a 000 size guitar) it's also -- quite different.

It's entirely made from solid mahogany throughout, with rosewood fretboard and bridge. It's got way cool checker binding on top, back, and soundhole, and plain-Jane binding on the fretboard. The headstock has a real nice celluloid "tortoise" overlay, but the guitar has no corresponding pickguard.

I've done a lot of work on this instrument -- reset the neck, gave it a fret dress, cleaned it up a bunch, reglued (and bolted) the original pinless bridge (as it had been sloppily reglued before so I had to take it up), installed a Bridge Doctor to help ease tension on the ladder-braced top, and installed a new bone saddle.

Oh, right, it also has a new set of repro Kluson strip tuners.

The guitar sounds great with that mahogany balanced tone that veers towards the woody and mellow in the treble and focused in the bass. It's pretty loud, too.

The only "bad" with this guitar is that the neck has a little warp in the neck which means the action is 3/16" at the 12th fret... which makes this a rock-on blues or open tuning guitar especially if you use bottleneck slides... but means that if you like chording fast up the neck you might look elsewhere. Cowboy chords in the 1st-to5th frets are comfy, though.

With a raised nut it'd be a super-killer Hawaiian guitar, too... which would take it right back to its Oahu-branded roots!

Used some abalone dots to cover the two "wing" bolts and the center bolt that attaches to the Bridge Doctor under the hood. The secret of Bridge Doctor use is to keep it as loose as you can, sort of like a soundpost in a violin, so that it helps to support but doesn't push back up on the soundboard... which dampens tone. On a guitar like this it helps to sort out some of the compression issues with ladder bracing so sustain, volume, and clarity open right up. Many folks pop in Bridge Doctors on old guitars and crank them down hard, which ruins tone.

Beautiful mahogany all over, by the way.

...and the sunburst everywhere? Yum. Finish is nitro and in excellent shape, too.

Cool aluminum end pin.