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My partner in crime Chavez, picked up these laminate archtop bodies that were made in 1968 and have been sitting unfinished ever since when the factory went out of business. The name brand was Standel also known as Harptone..
They hired Sam Koontz (A renowned arch top maker) to design these guitars which were basically copies of a Gibson ES-335.

As you could see in the pictures when they did the celluloid binding they were really sloppy with the glue and it was a lot of work to sand it down carefully without going through the veneer, which is very thin.

So my job is to clean them up attach the neck with the dovetail, make a fretboard route, all the pick up mortises and controls and lacquer them. They will have a burgundy nitro finish.

I also pulled out the truss rod and am going to install a new one.

They only made 300 of these guitars before they went out of business, but there are enough of them for sale on Reverb ,so I can get most of the details to finish them. I have attached A Reverb ad for one of them so you can see what they look like finished.








https://reverb.com/item/26494762-stande ... dy-vibrato


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Pretty cool piece!

Interesting, to say the least.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Cool. A friend had a Harptone acoustic back in the early 80’s. It was actually a great sounding ax.

I think making cases was Harptone’s main gig wasn’t it?

Think it is worth all the work to complete those? Will they sell at any kind of profit with all the pretty darn good Pacific Rim Copies out there?

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

It looks like a fun project. How many units do you have to put together? Do you have the hardware that goes with them? Did they all have a burgundy finish or can you offer people a custom finish if you want to?
If you have a number of instruments to build I could see doing it both ways - assuming you can get the hardware, build them as originally spec'd - or - building custom guitars where the buyer selects the hardware and finish they want and then you build it.
The guitar on reverb you linked to had a moderately high asking price - is that what they generally sell for?

Yes, Harptone was a big case company.

I am pretty sure TKL bought them out...

The guy I work with-it's his project so he is taking the risk. I am getting paid hourly and I really like this type of work.

We have 4 bodies that are all the same, but only one neck.

There is no hardware but there is close stuff available. My buddy wants to finish this one burgundy and has different plans for the others. He has a really good repair business so he gets a lot of people through his shop.

Standel was mostly an amplifier company--great amps, and everybody played through them in the old days. Standel was a contraction of Standard Electronics. They made all of their own amplifiers, as well as amps for other companies, but other companies built their guitars for them. Mosrite built a lot of solid body Standel guitars, and Sam Koontz/Harptone built a lot of their hollow bodies. Standel built some amps that were branded Mosrite too.

But the Standel amps were hot items. Chet Atkins, Wes Montgomery, all of the steel guitar players played them in the fifties and early sixties. Leo Fender supposedly tried to rip off some of the Standel circuits, so Bob Crooks of Standel started sealing his later solid state modules in epoxy so they wouldn't be easy to reverse engineer. It was these sealed modules that eventually sealed Standel's fate--they got a batch of bad transistors, and the amps weren't easy to repair except at the factory. It's a shame, since they were such nice amps for clean applications. But, that sealed the fate of the guitars too...

Dave