1960s Kay Vanguard Electric Guitar

This guitar came my way via Ben & Bucky's in Burlington -- they handed us a box of guitar scraps that included this guitar and a Kay parlor (which I electric-rubber-bridged for Ancel) as well as other fun odds and ends. We got sick of working for other folks last Saturday and instead wound-up our day doing projects for one another. He planed and refretted the neck on this guy for me and I worked on that parlor for him.

The rest of the work done on this was mine and while the body and wiring was actually in good shape, the neck on it was quite shot when it arrived. I had to yank the fretboard, recut a truss rod slot, compress the neck under tension "straighter" and install a new rod with a reinforced aluminum housing as an extra neck stiffener, reglue the board, and then Ancel finished off the fretwork that was a must.

After that I modded the original tailpiece to allow it to fit some compensated Tele-style saddles (the original "archtop-style" bridge design was fine but not ideal) and then wire-in a ground to the tail as well. It also got a new bone nut and new 18:1 Grover Sta-Tite tuners.

Post-repairs it's really, really good -- it has a quick neck with a modern, fast feel to it and the pickup has a sort-of old-shool jump-blues, jazzy-ish sound played clean or a bit of a raunchy, gritty sound when piled with dirt. The necks on these are strange -- 1 5/8" nut widths, medium-C/D profiles, a curvy 9 1/2" or 10" radius to the board, and a really long 25 3/4" scale length. I've got it strung with 46w-10 at the moment.

I like this instrument best for chord-chopping work but it's a great lead machine, too, given the right pedal setup to give it some top-end bite. I got to hang-in with my friend Rob at a local gig last Friday for an hour or so and played this guy open-tuned and doing lead and fill work.

The longer part of the story of this model is I owned one many moons ago as my "first electric that I liked," before I got my "first good electric," which was a Mexican Fender Tele. I really liked the Vanguard but its playability was definitely not the best for a novice even though I got the action down to a "decent" level. My Vanguard was actually hollow-bodied but the vast majority were like this one -- a poplar body capped with a thin layer of birch ply on the back and front to dress them up.

They're lightweight, too, clocking-in at usually under 6 lbs.