1920s Regal Size 5 Spruce/Birch Tenor Guitar

This is a customer's old Chicago-made Regal tenor and now that it's fixed-up it has that same punchy, warm, and out-front tone that I expect from these. Regal used this basic 12-fret tenor guitar design all the way through the 30s and there's a reason -- it's quite successful. It combines good airspace for a small body with a lightweight ladder-braced build, comfortable shorter scale, and lots of carrying-power. This spruce-topped, birch-bodied variation is the most common version I see, too.

The instrument itself is in average shape for the time and only has a center-seam (repaired) crack on the front and no cracks on the back. The sides have a few hairlines that needed to be glued-up and there's an ugly "old repair" to the back seam near the endblock that I fudged back-together, but otherwise -- it's in good health.

Work included fixing up the above and also a fret level/dress, new bone nut, new compensated rosewood bridge, new tuners, and some back brace regluing.

The Regal logo is inlaid in celluloid.

 Pearl dots and nickel-silver frets are in a stained-maple fretboard.

My new rosewood bridge is compensated for two-wound, two-plain stringing -- so it'll work for CGDA and DGBE, among others.

The binding is all black celluloid.

While the 50s-style tuners aren't period-correct, they're cheap, look decent from the front, and are very functional compared to the mixed-bag of friction pegs that came with the instrument.

Here's the fudged-together remains of the funky old end-seam repair job. This actually looks a lot better than it did before. The important part is that it's solid and good-to-go under the crustiness. 

There are some things I need to fight in terms of repairs and some things that will just eat up a lot of time, you know?