Highly customized Airline electric (formerly acoustic) guitar

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's an email I received this morning about the above-pictured guitar:

I've been a reader of your blog for a little over two years, and I assured myself that if I finished a significant project- I'd send it in to Guitarz. That being said, writing this email is proving to be a rather frightening experience. I'm well aware that the mutilation of vintage musical instruments is a practice that's frowned upon by you and the vast majority of your readers. (A Peavey Predator that someone went after with a jigsaw a few weeks back comes to mind.)

Your write up of this project may very well read like a scathing greatest hits of your favorite amateurish DIY criticisms, with the situation worsened by the fact that I'm attempting to sell it. I'm not saying this in the hope that you'll pull punches- I'm just acknowledging that I understand what I'm getting myself into.

Johnny

Could this conversion of an old Airline acoustic into an electric guitar be considered sacrilege? Well, I think we'll leave that question for the devoted Airline fans to decide on. For myself, I think it looks fantastic. There's a major difference between your customized Airline and the crudely chopped-up Peavey that you mentioned. The Peavey was a completely inexpert bodge-job that just ended up looking like an abomination. As a contrast, your customization of the Airline guitar seems to have been carried out with some reverence to the brand; it's sympathetic to the style and vintage nature of Airline Guitars and the era from which they come from.

I'm intrigued as to what the acoustic guitar was like at the start of the project. (Any pics?) I'm hoping that it was an instrument that had seen far better days, and that with your electric conversion project that you have actually enhanced the instrument. I mean, the Airline collectors might argue that it should have been kept as a museum piece, but what's better: a guitar hanging on a wall or in a display cabinet, untouched and unplayed, or a guitar customized and brought back to life which is ready to see years and years more playing action?

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Airline Town and Country vintage guitar

guitarz.blogspot.com:

This vintage Valco-made Airline Town and Country hardtail guitar from 1961 illustrates quite nicely that not all Airlines had those Res-O-Glas bodies for which they were famous. With the back plate removed, the construction is revealed to be quite crude. Obviously the three pickups (actually single coils in humbucker-sized cases) are front loaded, but note that there's no way of adjusting the height.
This post originates at http://guitarz.blogspot.com - beware of those damned scraper blogs!
Currently being offered for sale on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $1,899.99.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Airline 7215 Stratotone by Harmony

guitarz.blogspot.com:

This Harmony-built hollow-bodied Airline 7215 is a rare model in the Stratotone family of guitars, as there is no Harmony own-branded equivalent. They were sold in 1963-64 via the Montgomery Wards catalogue. The pictured example, said to be in mint condition, is currently being offered for sale on eBay in the UK with a Buy It Now price of £975.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

PJ Harvey plays an Airline

guitarz.blogspot.com

Yesterday evening, PJ Harvey was playing her brand new album live in Paris, and this was also on arte.tv. Not only Polly-Jean is one the most talented artist of her generation, but she has very good taste when it comes to guitars. 

This time she traded her usual Firebird or Gretsch Broadkaster for a 3 pickup Airline, thought I cannot tell from the picture if it's an original model or an Eastwood reissue - the last version of it with the rubber band around the body - and I couldn't find anything about this on the Web...

EDIT: thanks to our readers, I can tell now that it's an original Airline - the Eastwood has a black truss-rod cover on the headstock, and a wide tune-o-matic bridge...

Bertram

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Airline archtop acoustic guitar

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Further evidence that you can't always believe what you read on eBay. The seller of this gloriously Art Deco-looking Airline archtop obviously hasn't done his/her homework when listing this guitar on eBay, claiming it is from the 1940s. Although now revived by Eastwood Guitars, originally Airline was a brandname of the Valco Manufacturing Company for guitars sold through Montgomery Ward mail order between 1958-1968.

By the way, although this guitar looks fine in the above images, photos on the eBay listing showing the rear of the guitar tell a sadder story. The neck/body join needs some serious repair work.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

1959 Valco Airline

guitarz.blogspot.com

Another original of these vintage Valco Airline guitars re-issued by Eastwood in the 2000s. 

Airline was a house brand of department store Montgomery Ward - built by Valco - and we already posted about the complicated cross-brand background of this kind of guitars...

bertram

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

1964 Res-O-Glas Supro Airline

guitarz.blogspot.com

After showing the Eastwood wooden reissue and the Res-O-Glas kits, I couldn't not show the original model - a 1964 Supro Airline. The logo on the headstock is not genuine though everything else is - someone strangely wanted to emphasize the authenticity of the guitar by modifying it! The pickups are not humbuckers but large singlecoils and of course, the body is made of glass-fiber.

If you think of it, having only the volume knob under the strings makes sense, that's the only one you want to reach quickly while playing, without risking to mistake it with the other ones, that require more careful use...

bertram

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

Res-O-Glas Guitar Kits

guitarz.blogspot.com

A few days ago I posted about Eastwood's famous reissue of VALCO's Airline - an undeniable upgrade with its chambered mahogany body -, and in the comments we debated about the good and bad of the original Res-O-Glas body - cheap and acoustically disputable, but absolutely avant-garde when it was first released in the 60s.

Surfing on the new focus on the Airline line brought by the White Stripes and Eastwood, a company now reissues Res-O-Glas Airline bodies for guitar kits. I like their policy, since they deliberately promote Frankenstein guitars assembled around their bodies with bits of vintage and new gear (some people even get Eastwoods for the neck and gears and just change the body!), sometimes in the original spirit, often in completely bizarre configuration like one I saw with a Flying V neck that actually fits quite well!

They just start to release different models so you don't have to keep to the most famous one to built your guitar, and they also provide a few elements of gears, the most interesting being an art-deco stoptail that will be probably on my next project!

bertram

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

Airline 3P DLX by Eastwood

guitarz.blogspot.com

OK, it's easy and most of our readers already know Eastwood's reissue of this Airline rejuvenated by Jack White (before he became an idol and switched to custom Gretschs), but I like this guitar a lot.

It's somehow the perfect anti-Fender/Gibson guitar, and Eastwood's replacement of the original Airline 'res-O-glas' body by a chambered mahogany one upgrades the cool but cheap vintage guitar to a modern quality one. And it still has the many Italian style knobs and switches above the strings we enjoy so much, plus the very special shape (who would dare to design this nowadays?), the german carve, and the strong presence of 3 pickups in line with a Bigsby trem.

Some say that Eastwood pickups are not the greatest (the demos I heard convinced me though) but there are many replacement pickups out there - and it would make sense that one wants to personalize this kind of guitar since it's not mainly noticeable for the specificity of its sound!

bertram

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

1965 Airline Bobkat

guitarz.blogspot.com

I really like the shape of this vintage Airline Bobcat, though I'm not so sure that you can really call it an Airline Bobcat: it seems that the model is originally a Harmony H14 Bobcat that was reissued as Airline 7250 - another complicated intertwining brands issue typical of the 60s (maybe future guitar historians will feel the same about the guitars of the 10s cheap Chinese era).

I've never played a guitar with a single pickup in the middle of the body but it feels right, though information I've had so far about nodal points (where the strings vibrates at their best and the pickups should be) is always confused and contradictory...

So any comments about Harmony/Airline and nodal points/central pickup issues are welcome!

bertram

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