1950s Voss (Klira) Fancy Archtop Guitar
A customer of mine brought this in for repair and, frankly, I was thrown a bit by this guitar because so much was wrong with it. The neck needed a reset and it had a huge warp and twist in it as well. The (replacement) bridge radius had no bearing to the actual radius of the fretboard (a super-tight ~5" or so) and someone had hackily-installed a Japanese magnetic pickup in the middle of the top and loaded the old (wonky) wiring harness at the lower bout without a ground to the tailpiece.
Work included fixing all of this -- a neck reset that involved also regluing the heel/main portion of the neck (as it came apart at the seam), a refret with jumbo stock that allowed enough leveling-off to mostly sort the neck problems out by taking it out of the frets (not ideal but it worked), and then general tidying-up and a replacement wiring harness and some mounting posts for the pickup. The end result is a bright-sounding jazzbox that could easily double into amplified gypsy-jazz or rockabilly sounds. The acoustic sound is pretty trashy -- bright and without much depth -- but that's to be expected for an all-ply, weirdo monstrosity.
While branded Voss, this was very much likely made at the Klira factory in Germany and it's one of the fanciest versions I've seen. Not only does it have a wild tailpiece and three soundholes, it also has checker purfling and a lot of big-block inlays and multi-ply binding throughout. It's a looker!
The '60s pickup, wiring harness, tuners, and bridge are unoriginal but the rest looks right.
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