NGD: weird late-70s Kay LP

strtdv

A friend of mine gave me this a couple of years ago, but I lent it to another friend who wanted to learn guitar but he ended up leaving it neglected in his garage. I believe it's a late 70s example of a Kay Effector.

I finally retrieved it and set about getting it playable.

Issues were:
-Tuners were a mix of original and replacement, almost all of them unusable and heavily rusted. One of the ferrules was missing from the headstock too.

-Missing control knobs

-Action was set at about 5mm, with terrible intonation

-It was all generally grubby and in need of a good clean.

I fitted a set of cheap Kluson style tuners I picked up for £20 on Amazon, which included ferrules to replace the missing one, gave it as good a setup as the occasional slightly uneven fret would allow, got some new knobs, and gave it all a good clean.

The obvious difference from a standard LP is the on-board effects. These all seem to produce variations on a phaser/flanger type sound and aren't great quality to be honest. The fuzz is great though, not very high gain but sounds good.
Other oddities are the lack of pickup selector, instead there's a switch to put them in or out of phase.

The neck is bolt on as expected for a cheap guitar of this era, though rather unexpectedly the body appears to be solid mahogany with a maple cap (I was expecting mahogany plywood).

Obligatory pic, more to follow: 
[img]https://i.imgur.com/Dj2g7hR.jpeg[/img]

GoFish

You got it? Nice one! I've always been fascinated by these. Not expecting much, mind.

Kittyfrisk

I'd love to have one of these Kay's to have fun with too.

JezWynd

What a cool thing. Strange that you are unable to select a pickup.

Henrytwang

Interesting guitar, it looks to be in good condition for its age, I’ve seen a few of these on EBay and usually they’re in poor condition with non-functioning effects. Yours is in such nice condition it would probably benefit from a fret level in order to get the best from it.

Lawriejones1

Love these. 

bertie

my first thought....................... 1977 Grattan catalogue,    Kay and Hondo II  a plenty............Lorenzo...............

CarbonCopy

My Dad had one of these and it was in excellent condition with fully functioning effects when I sold it about 10 years ago.

He had it from new.

Despite having free access to it as a child in the 90s, I rarely ever played it. I had a Japanese Squier Stratocaster which I preferred by far despite the Squier being made from HDF and having crap tuners and pickups. I didn't know anything about guitars at the time, but knew I didn't like playing it.

My recollection is that on the Kay, the frets were badly installed and sharp, the guitar was incredibly heavy, it was difficult to play, difficult to tune and it sounded bad. The effects do really not do what the labels state (apart from the fuzz) and are each just a minor variation of each other.

I suppose it has quirky novelty value, but I would be surprised if the novelty doesn't wear off very quickly!

strtdv

CarbonCopy said:

My Dad had one of these and it was in excellent condition with fully functioning effects when I sold it about 10 years ago.

He had it from new.

Despite having free access to it as a child in the 90s, I rarely ever played it. I had a Japanese Squier Stratocaster which I preferred by far despite the Squier being made from HDF and having crap tuners and pickups. I didn't know anything about guitars at the time, but knew I didn't like playing it.

My recollection is that on the Kay, the frets were badly installed and sharp, the guitar was incredibly heavy, it was difficult to play, difficult to tune and it sounded bad. The effects do really not do what the labels state (apart from the fuzz) and are each just a minor variation of each other.

I suppose it has quirky novelty value, but I would be surprised if the novelty doesn't wear off very quickly!

I agree with a lot of that, though I think the fundamental tone is quite nice. The effects are largely useless, and while the fuzz sound is pretty good it's a one trick pony.
The frets aren't sharp on mine and the new tuners have solved the tuning stability issues.
It's fun to play, I don't expect it to play like an American guitar but for having cost me the grand total of £30 (new tuners and knobs) I reckon it's worth hanging on to.

The other big plus is I can leave it next to the sofa and don't need to worry about my 4 year old damaging it