Can anyone identify this Kay guitar?

Funkfingers

HarrySeven said:

Why people ask upwards of £400 for these amazes me.

Avarice, avarice and avarice. 

DulcetJones

I recently bought an early 60's Guyatone lap steel that has very similar pick ups, switches and knobs. (not helpful I know but......)  

simonhpieman

Echo all of this. My brother found one of the but SG shaped in a skip and while he fixed it up he probably paid about the right price for it!

It plays but not in any way that I'd consider enjoyable.

boogieman

I had a Top Twenty, Woolworths version of a strat. It actually looked quite cool in a red fading to black burst. Looking cool was about all it did though, it was certainly no good as an actual guitar. 

Henrytwang

DulcetJones said:

I recently bought an early 60's Guyatone lap steel that has very similar pick ups, switches and knobs. (not helpful I know but......)  

I bought one of those for £25 at a boot sale a few years ago. After cleaning off around 40 years worth of grime I sold it for £170 on eBay. I do admit to feeling a bit guilty at the time but the buyer was delighted with it 

uncledick

boogieman said:

I had a Top Twenty, Woolworths version of a strat. It actually looked quite cool in a red fading to black burst. Looking cool was about all it did though, it was certainly no good as an actual guitar. 

The Woolworths ones were called Audition.  The Top Twenty range usually came from Grattans catalogues and the like.  I still have mine - complete with the Ibanez Super 70 Humbucker I fitted way back when.

scrumhalf

HarrySeven said:

meltedbuzzbox said:

Paging @HarrySeven ;

Isn’t that a (made in Taiwan) Kay KJP-2?

I love the false modesty of "Isn't that...".

You know. We know you know. You know we know you know.

prowla

uncledick said:

boogieman said:

I had a Top Twenty, Woolworths version of a strat. It actually looked quite cool in a red fading to black burst. Looking cool was about all it did though, it was certainly no good as an actual guitar. 

The Woolworths ones were called Audition.  The Top Twenty range usually came from Grattans catalogues and the like.  I still have mine - complete with the Ibanez Super 70 Humbucker I fitted way back when.

I recently bought this Audition, in a kind of nostalgic remember-how-crap-they-were sort of way.

It cost me the princely sum of £31.16, which is probably £30 more than it's worth...

Unfortunately (or fortunately!) its pickup is dead, so I hacked a plate out of a broken Strat pickguard and put a Strat one there. It really rings out, but is noisy as heck. (I may get the original pickup sorted - I was hoping Alegree might be at last week's Kempton show.)

The machines were also pooped, but a set of vintage-style ones fitted.

Curiously, I do have a hankering for one of their equally awful vaguely-looks-like-a-Ric basses, but people seem to think they're worth money (there's a YT video of someone saying they're worth $000s...).

ICBM

prowla said:

Unfortunately (or fortunately!) its pickup is dead, so I hacked a plate out of a broken Strat pickguard and put a Strat one there. It really rings out, but is noisy as heck.

It may have no string ground wire, a lot of them don't. And it definitely won't be shielded!

Given that the bridge will need moving anyway to make it intonate properly, you can check for a ground wire and fit one if it's not there.

jonnyburgo

They have a trashy garage rock charm but invariably the action will be either like an egg slicer or buzzing and dead spots up and down the neck. This is the reason why they often come with “set up for slide” in the description. I like the way some loook but they were bedroom punk guitars and nothing more really. USA Kays are often really good though, but overpriced these days.

HarrySeven

Talking of punk...I'll just leave these here...

impmann

The Starway guitar (not a spelling mistake).

Eastwood even made a replica of it...

As soon as they got the money, though, Shelley stopped playing it. 

Andy79

jonnyburgo said:

They have a trashy garage rock charm but invariably the action will be either like an egg slicer or buzzing and dead spots up and down the neck. This is the reason why they often come with “set up for slide” in the description. I like the way some loook but they were bedroom punk guitars and nothing more really. USA Kays are often really good though, but overpriced these days.

Agreed, Kay and Harmony made some great gear, acoustic also, in their hay-day

(I is a Harmony Stratotone really worth the title of vintage and a price tag of £900? Probably not)

but when it all got sold off and went east the quality plummeted. Association by name only. I think sellers sometimes ‘forget ‘ this. Likewise some buyers do to.  

ICBM

jonnyburgo said:

They have a trashy garage rock charm but invariably the action will be either like an egg slicer or buzzing and dead spots up and down the neck. This is the reason why they often come with “set up for slide” in the description.

Not always - I would say about half of the ones I've worked on can be set up to play reasonably well even without fret work. They're never going to be a Les Paul or an Ibanez RG, but perfectly adequate for the type of music they will be used for.

The other half do indeed have uneven frets, often lifting or simply never fitted correctly in the first place, and sometimes clipped too short for the fingerboard so there are nasty sharp ends. If it's one of these, you'd have to really love doing refrets to make it worthwhile...

HarrySeven

impmann said:

The Starway guitar (not a spelling mistake).

Eastwood even made a replica of it...

As soon as they got the money, though, Shelley stopped playing it. 

Indeed.

The Eastwood guitar seemed such a dodgy idea, too - an expensive replica of a cheap, hacked about instrument, far removed from it's original context and intent.

hollywoodrox

I seem to remember one with built in fx units too

prowla

HarrySeven said:

Talking of punk...I'll just leave these here...

Could he strum it?

Funkfingers

HarrySeven said:

impmann said:

The Starway guitar (not a spelling mistake).

Eastwood even made a replica of it...

As soon as they got the money, though, Shelley stopped playing it. 

Indeed.

The Eastwood guitar seemed such a dodgy idea, too - an expensive replica of a cheap, hacked about instrument, far removed from it's original context and intent.

I quite fancied the idea of buying one of those outfits until I actually saw one in the flesh in Central London in 2012 … and the asking price. 

Legend has it that Shelley’s original Starway guitar got dropped (or flung) onto the stage, causing the body to split along a glue line. Shelley simply continued to play it *as is*. In some magazine interview, he claimed to still have the detached part.