Mid 1960's Premier Acoustic

I've had this guitar a few months now. It's from the mid 1960's, and is believed to be the H165 made by Harmony and badged as Premier. It's all mahogany.





We moved my Maton EA80C and Martin D18VE to Australia in August, to take advantage of "free freight", as checked in baggage to get them relocated. That left the only acoustics in the house to be Allison's Harmony Sovereign with nylon strings, my Liberty LB100 nickel on brass resonator, and my 1953 Silvertone electric archtop, which to be honest doesn't sound that great until it's plugged in.

To fill the void of an around-the-house regular old steel string guitar, I picked up this little Premier for $89. You can see in the listing picture, it came with a Kent sound hole pickup, which actually works quite well. Those old Dakaware knobs are very cool. Despite being dried out, it was in reasonable shape if you can look beyond the several holes it has accumulated. Someone had also sanded the head stock and laid down some kind of green primer, for reasons unknown.

I spent time over this weekend working on it. I took it all apart, including complete disassembly of the tuners. I dressed the frets, with a couple of grades of steel wool, using a piece of a milk jug that I'd cut out with a slit to lay over the frets - so I could rub the fret wire itself without scratching the fret board. I also put the steel wool to work on the tail piece, the tuner strips, string posts, and the hex ferrules. I oiled the fret board, and the rest of the body, and put some new Martin 10-46 strings on. I oiled the tuners, and sanded lightly the head stock to take away most of that green primer, without going too deep.

I'm very happy with it! The trapeze tail piece is good in that it keeps the top of the body lifting when strings are attached traditionally to the bridge, so it's nice and flat. But this does make for a slightly different ring to the strings. It's not as warm as it might be, but the mahogany body makes up for that, it's a real treat for the price.