1970s Harmony H159 (Modified) Jumbo Flattop Guitar




The H159 was Harmony's down-scale version of the H1260 and... yes... it's quite down-scale, eliminating solid spruce over solid mahogany and "real" binding for solid birch all-over, a poplar neck, dyed-maple fretboard and bridge, and no truss rod. This one arrived as a train-wreck of badly-repaired and busted seams, missing and loose bracing galore, a split pin bridge, loose neck, and all that other good stuff that comes with a poorly-stored guitar.

Its owner wanted me to do some modding to it along the lines of this guy, and so that's what happened. I jacked the neck up off the body (archtop-style) during the bolted+glued neck reset, filled-in the pinholes on the bridge and converted it to an adjustable unit, scrounged a tailpiece, fixed up all those seams and missing/loose braces, gave the frets a level/dress, and set it up. This will get used as an open-G slide guitar and so the adjustable nature of the bridge gives it the ability to go from a fingerpicker to a slider on the fly. I recorded the soundclip in open D tuning with the action setup "as normal."


The interesting thing about converting these old ladder-braced jumbo (well, this is like a super-dread at 16" across) guitars to a tailpiece/adjustable setup is that their volume almost always jumps-up another half-as-much, the playability increases by default (tailpiece setup = slinkier strings due to the extra string afterlength), and both the bass and treble frequencies are freed-up greatly yielding a "fuller" tone.

The downside, of course, is that you gain a bit of extra overtone presence and, like a resonator guitar, all the energy is "used up at once," which means that you lose a bit of lingering bass and mids sustain while gaining a bit more on the treble side.


The nut is 1 11/16" and the board has a light radius. The neck shape is a small-medium C-type. This has the usual 25 1/4" or so Harmony scale for the time.


The only "real" binding on the guitar is at the board! The dots are faux-pearl.



The original bridge is seen, here, chopped-up a bit, with its pin-holes hastily-filled, and the new archtop-style adjustable saddle installed. I made this new saddle up quickly from a bit of rosewood.


The rather-nice tailpiece is an old 12-string unit.



A lot of the back seams were poorly-repaired beforehand (including missing and/or dislodged kerfing) and "slipped," too. I did the best I could with all of them and they're stable, now, but not beautiful. The idea was not to make a budget guitar into a gold-digging repair.


New Kluson-style repro tuners grace the headstock... because the originals were fussy.





Here you can see the big old rosewood "step" under the board extension.

Comments

"The downside, of course, is that you gain a bit of extra overtone presence and, like a resonator guitar, all the energy is "used up at once," which means that you lose a bit of lingering bass and mids sustain while gaining a bit more on the treble side."???? I don't get this at all?