Help Identify this Vintage Archtop

[lammie200]

Could you not reduce the height of the saddle by carefully sanding the bottom part that sits on the thumbwheels?

There is a load of meat on that saddle. Grab some 220 grit, a flat surface and lap that sucker. You might want to take some off the top too and cut some nicer groves. Those look kind of sloppy but probably dont creat problems.

Depends on the break angle he is getting off the tailpiece. It could get to be too shallow if the bridge gets any lower.

[MDB85]

Could the guitar be german? Anyone any clue?

[Zack]

Pause cafe


Ok,..so been going round and about in Japan for over a week now and finding it exhausting this time round. Had a few chat with various peeps here about your guitar. Can't identify still but one suggestion that came a couple of times is that the jack input may have been intended for plugging in a radio rather than a guitar amp. And if so, all that is needed is to buuld some sort of adaptor to hold instead a switchcraft input jack and that should solve it then.
All the best

[Gitterbug]

The brand of the OP's guitar may well remain unknown - if there's been a brand in the first place. Before solid bodies, and for a long time in parallel with those, the archtop in less or more sophisticated incarnations was the reigning type of electric guitar. In the post-war economic and trading conditions, German archtop brands and Levin represented the top tier in Europe. Yet, even these were outside the reach of many hobbyist players. I have seen guitars of more or less the same level of sophistication crafted by sailors, prisoners and amateur/pro builders whose names have sunk into oblivion. Not all are treasures. The bottom tier was cheap plywood mail order guitars like Lucky 7, which seem to have retained some level of collectability.

I believe that the US military personnel stationed in Europe was an important agent in Trans-Atlantic archtop traffic, both directions.