My Kay 8224/K-24/Kay Professional Cutaway Story:
My Kay guitar was acquired by my father in the middle of the Bering Sea in the summer of 1962 from an Alaskan acquaintance to whom my father had given some much needed equipment. The equipment had been a donation to someone in need. The gift of the guitar was a act of reciprocation in gratitude. My father was given a choice of a number of guitars. There was a Tsimshian man with my father who was a fairly accomplished country picker; he evaluated the guitars on offer and chose the Kay. In the tradition of fathers coming home from sea with pug dogs and parrots, the guitar was presented to me as a gift upon my father's return. It was my first guitar.
I was large for my age, but when seated I could barely get my arm around the guitar, and I could
just reach first position. The Tsimshian man showed me how to tune it and tried to show me some basic things.
I don't recall how long I had had the guitar before I was taken to a local music shop, caseless guitar in hand. The shop owner, an elderly Italian man, wanted the guitar, saying it was too big for me, and offered a smaller guitar in straight trade. While the Kay was most definitely
not the used Gibson Melody Maker I had been drooling over in another shop and had been agitating for with my parents, it was way way cooler looking that what was on offer from the Italian shop owner, so I emphatically declined the offer of a trade. And besides, the Kay had been a gift from my father. My mom bought a cardboard case from the shop owner. The shop owner said that I should come for lessons. My mom agreed. The shop owner said that since the guitar was a Grand Auditorium model, it needed heavy gauge strings, and he went into one of his display cabinets and disturbed the dust on a large stack of boxes of Mapes strings. Something associated with the strings, an image on the box or in the display material, suggested that the strings were intended for use on old-time acoustic archtops - I don't remember clearly now. The strings were round wound steel strings, something suitable for use in holding up suspension bridges. Over the time that my mom insisted that I continue with lessons at this shop, the supply of Mapes strings slowly dwindled as the shop owner kept selling them to my mom. The two things here, lessons and strings, did immense damage to my development as a musician and to my Kay guitar.
The lessons were boring and basically killed my enthusiasm for learning guitar.
The strings were excruciatingly painful for my little hands and were a major disincentive to practicing.
The strings were also completely inappropriate for the Kay guitar as it has no truss rod, at least not an adjustable one. Over the couple of years that I was forced to take lessons, the neck on the guitar began to pull, and it became increasingly less and less playable. In its present condition, the guitar is more suitable for slicing cheese or hard boiled eggs than for playing.
I kept the guitar for sentimental reasons. In the 1970s, I took it to a luthier in Victoria, and he said that the neck did not need to be reset. It needed to be heated and clamped on blocks to straighten it, but the long term prognosis for the repair was not good, as the problem would likely return slowly over time. There was also the option of removing the fretboard and installing a truss rod. The cost for the neck straightening was not unreasonable, but it was more than I could afford with my then student budget. The cost of truss rod installation was totally out of proportion to the instrument's complete lack of value at the time – it would have been considered next to worthless even if it had been in perfect condition. So I put it away and did nothing. Some time in the 1980s, I bought a better case for it – a crime of opportunity. A couple of years ago, I opened the case in a nostalgic mood and found that the tuner buttons had started to disintegrate.
Perlexingly, I have seen these guitars in good condition up for sale with an asking price of close to $1,000.00. Mine is not in good condition. I have floated it on CL a couple of times with an honest description of the guitar and its problems, but my heart was not in selling it, and my refusal to budge on price killed any interest in the guitar.
I have attempted old-school, alcohol-lamp-heating, neck straightening on
experimental-sacrificial-victim, garage-sale-purchased, Taiwanese-made guitars. The results were always disastrous. The repair job is obviously more difficult than it looks, so I have never considered trying it on my Kay. But I have thought about taking it back to see a luthier for a new quote on repair.
BTW, Mapes still exists and is and has always been one of the largest manufacturers of piano and spring wire. They also manufacture guitar strings or components of guitar strings for other companies, although they no longer offer guitar strings under their own name.
http://www.mapesstrings.com/instrument-strings
http://www.mapeswire.com/specialtywire.html