Your Grandpa's Guitar

1960's Kay Dreadnought

Here we have a 1960's Kay dreadnought.  This guitar follows as a great companion to the Kay jumbo in the previous post although a bit more of a project and not quite as amenable as the jumbo was.  It took a lot to get her to its current state.  Again, I pulled the bridge on this one.  The old bridge was shaved down way beyond where it should be.  It was so thin that I'm surprised it supported any string tension.  When I pulled it off, it came off in pieces because of how thin it was.  Thankfully I had a period Kay replacement bridge that fits nicely.

The real work on this guitar was the neck work done by James Ralston.  I steamed the neck off and attempted a reset, but had little luck.  I sent it to James and after a lot more hours than either one of us expected he got it reset to perfection.  James had to do a bunch of work on the fretboard as well as a fair amount of fretwork to get everything to where it should be.  The neck is now straight and plays great.  I like the neck on this guitar.  Its not as smooth as the aforementioned Kay jumbo but it has a unique profile.  It has that baseball bat depth but the fretboard is not as wide as you would expect.  Note the nice big frets and the oversized pearloid dots.

The amount of time James had to put into getting this dread to act nice was a lot more than any low budget guitar should require.  A testament to his work ethic.  He comes highly recommended by me.  Check out his website at roadtoastguitars.com

The good news is that I probably have one of the few Kay dreads from this period that plays well, has a straight neck and intonates properly.  The guitar itself is not rare, but the fact that it plays well is. 

Note how the Kay dread features more of a square shouldered body.  To my eye is doesn't look like any other dread, which is amazing.  Again, just think, Kay was a company that was pumping out tons of guitars yet they were still able to incorporate elements of style and design that said this guitar is uniquely a Kay.  Kay had many elements of design that made their instruments unmistakable.  There are still a number of their older models on my wish list.