70’ s Kay hollowbody “wildwood”

Bought this one on the freemaket on queensday for 5 euro in a terrible condition, dirty, loose controls, misalligned neck, egmond high action.(still one string on it)

So for the non technical guitarist a lost case, back home i first cleaned it and rewired the controls, and cleaned the electronics with contactspray, and damn everything works!

Next the neck, the neckpocket is somehow distorted, that’s why the neck could move sideways, fixed this by glueing a chip of wood in the apropiate place.

The neckpocket is also distorted up, compared too the body upwards, which makes the neck angle too low.

So i needed to shim that sucker, in cases like this i always use small keglike strips of wood.

After several try’s i managed to get the action acceptable again, now subddenly the neck was also slightly bowed down.

This you see often on guitars who have been withou strings for a long time.

Left it laying over night with new strings on it to discover the next morning all has straightened out nicely , even the intonation was good to my amazement, only slightly off but not hearable for me.

That’s a nice bonus because the bridge can not be intonated, the neck seems to be a laminated one, which makes it a extremely strong one, only the scratchplate is missing now and i’m going to make one myself someday if i find a good picture online of a original one.

This kay is an early japanese, right after bankrupt of the american kay factory, and most likely at that time the teisco/kawai factory was producing kay guitars too at that time.