1960s Hofner Ambassador-style Hollowbody Electric Guitar (Modified)

This is one odd guitar. It looks like a mid-'60s Hofner Ambassador except... it's not! It shares the same body shape and over-the-top fretboard inlays, but the body is definitely not your average all-ply electric hollowbody. The top and back are thicker solid mahogany that's been pressed into shape and the sides are solid maple. It lacks binding (compared to the Ambassador's fancy binding) and it was originally issued with a Selmer-sourced Bigsby vibrato tailpiece. Its dimensions are almost exactly the same as a Gibson ES-335 with a 16" lower bout, 1 5/8" side depth, and featuring some insane fret access at the cutaways. It has a longer scale at 25 1/4" but does have a Gibson-familiar neck profile with a 1 5/8" nut, steeper-radius (9.5") fretboard, and medium C-shaped neck shape.

The pickups and most of the electronics were missing when this came to me, but it originally had some sort of surface-mount pickups that used two screws to fix them in place. The pickup selector switch plate (and its old, rotary switch) were extant, however.

To say this came in a sad state would be to extremely simplify the matter -- it had huge sections of misaligned/open seams, the neck's center seam was open down to the third fret and, as I found out later, the neck had a pretty cruddy warp on the bass side (but not on the treble) of it that would cause me consternation. I thought the repairs would be simple and straightforward but they certainly weren't. Sometimes a project just makes you want to throw it out a window or toss it in the fire!

In the end, work included repairing the seams as best as I could, installing a new shielded wiring harness and pickups, hodge-podging a new/vintage tailpiece, reslotting the original Bigsby-style aluminum bridge, giving it a board plane and refret with medium stock, cleaning it a bit, and setting it all up.

It's currently strung with 49w-11 strings with a wound G and the neck has only just a hair of relief (roughly 1/64") tuned to pitch. I'll wager that if the gauges were dropped down to 46w-10 it would be dead flat -- but these sound and feel so good! Action is 1/16" overall but just a hair higher on the low E string.

Believe me -- I was cursing at this guitar with abandon at some points -- but I'm very happy with how it turned-out. It's got a bright, jangly, countrified tone to it due to the pickups and long scale. In the neck position is a modern Danelectro-style Alnico lipstick pickup with original-style ohm rating (around 4k) and the bridge pickup is a humbucker-shelled Alnico P90 for that snarly, ES-330 sort-of bite and mids-punch. Depending on how you set the bridge pickup's height, too, you can use it to get a good "lead boost" in that poisition. With the 3-way control set to "both" pickups, the guitar has a good, responsive, chordal sound.

The whole instrument is crazy-lightweight and feels like air when it's hanging on a strap. It's lively and exciting to pick on it because of this and it does have a decent-enough-to-practice-with acoustic tone.

The original, pearloid-buttoned tuners look super-cool and you can see some of the "funk" of this guitar's life at the headstock. The zero fret area was chipped-out and I had to move the original nut forward to its position instead of using a new zero fret after refretting. The wear-and-tear behind the nut is from some unknown reason, however, as the zero fret only extended the nut area by 1/8" or so.

The neck is made from two piece of mahogany and one of ebony (apparently). You can see at the headstock that a previous glue job left the surface just a hair uneven on one side of the joint (not the side that I reglued).

The board plane and dress-up really brought that original fancy inlay right out to the fore. When I refretted, however, I cut the slots right into the binding to let me get the wire easily to the edge of the neck. This has a narrower neck than your average American guitar and the original fretting didn't leave much room for bends.

Note also that there are smaller patches of replacement binding up and down the neck.

The lipstick pickup is one from my parts-bin and -- hey! -- look at that worn-through spot on the bass side. Yeah -- I did that by accident a while back while futzing around on a partser-guitar but wanted to use this pickup on this guitar so... consider it "antiquing."

In an interesting aside -- note the hand-cut oddity of the pickup selector switch plate -- the screws are all off-center and the original hole for the switch was drilled off-center, too.

In these closeup pictures you can see the wear and tear to the finish, too -- it's got weather-check and nicks and small scratches all over and on the treble top/side seam area there's definitely some wear.

I love that aluminum bridge!

The replacement wiring harness has three 500k pots -- 2 volume and 1 tone. I re-used the original tone capacitor for the new tone pot and my new pots are close to what the original values (420k) were. The replacement knobs are uninspired but look pretty decent. All the new wiring is shielded.

While the hanger for the tailpiece is new, the tailpiece itself is a 1950s American-made unit that had the right aging for the look of this instrument.

The tuners work just fine and look tres cool.

The neck joint is in perfect shape and I added a strap button here as there never was a strap button near the neck.

The tailpiece is off of the top, though it's definitely low-hung. The back-angle on the saddle is excellent, however.

The whole treble-side top/side seam is a bit off from perfect, unfortunately. I loosened it all up and tried to get it back to "right," but this was the best I could do as it had crept a lot during its lifetime. Still -- touched-up with dark stain, it's not obvious at all unless you're looking for it.