1961 Harmony H46 Stratotone Mars Hollowbody Electric Guitar

This is a nice old Harmony Stratotone. I've worked on several just like this one and many more under the Sears Silvertone brand. This one has the interesting twist of stacked volume and tone pots for each pickup. As per the usual, it's very lightweight, has a short 24 1/8" scale length, and is super fun to play and kick-around with because of that light and compact nature.

That said, if these aren't serviced properly they're sort-of terrible to own and play. At a minimum, I like to:

• add a ground wire to the tailpiece from the wiring harness (usually missing)
• level and dress the frets
• add side dots
• compensate the saddle/bridge
• set it up properly

After that, there are some other things to address:

• rewire tone pots so they're "standard" in the way they're wired-up
• remove any extra capacitors or resistors in the circuit (very common)
• replace any longer non-shielded wiring runs with shielded wire

I did all of that to this guitar and, as a result, it turned into quite the little player and all of the murkiness and swampiness of the sound before fixing things in the circuit is gone. It's more of a firebreather, now, and ready for garage-rock fun.