S.S. Stewart Archtop

I found this little beauty (or it found me?) in a guitar shop just behind Denmark Street in London (where most of the guitar shops are to be found!). Since playing Aynsley Lister's fantastic F-hole slide guitar I'd been dreaming I might find something like this! Playing it in the shop revealed a fairly quiet guitar with a great bluesy sound, nice deep v-shaped neck and a surprisingly low action. The neck actually had a visible amount of back-bow (it's curved downwards in the wrong direction which ought to lead to buzzing strings) but all strings played well on every fret in the shop with no buzzing (I guess that's a product of the bridge being set high enough to compensate for the back-bow). Cosmetically it's in pretty poor condition and the top has separated slightly from the side at one point but I still liked the sound. At some point somebody's tried to strip the original finish off the guitar and they seem to have stopped as soon as the top was done - the back, sides and neck still have plenty of evidence of its former life!

After digging around on the web, my best guess is that this is a 1940s budget guitar made in Chicago by either Harmony or another company for the S.S. Stewart brand which apparently changed hands quite a few times. S.S. Stewart primarily made banjos and I've found very little information about their guitars (or at least guitars with the Stewart name) on the web. That's the main reason for this page really - maybe somebody can tell me more about this one!

One source suggests that the budget guitars were produced with very cheap plywood tops but the edge of the top around the f-holes looks like solid wood to me (but I'm no expert!). What do you think?

Another possibility is that someone replaced the original top with a solid top and that's the reason for the poor binding around the side? But the f-hole edge shows traces of paint which are probably from the original sunburst finish so I'm inclined to think this is the original top. Also, the guitar's got what looks like 60 years worth of dust inside it so the top obviously hasn't been off for quite a while!!

My plan for this one is to hopefully set it up as a slide guitar. With heavy gauge strings and a higher action, the back-bow won't matter so much. The nut is cut very low at the moment. Also, tuning down half a step to Eb or Open-Gb should make the guitar sound a bit warmer. I'd like to fit a pickup (or two?) but by a relatively non-invasive method so as not to lose any of the guitar's existing tone. The guitar has suffered a fair amount of abuse over the years but I don't want to add to that if I can help it! Two types of pickup spring to mind:

Mini-humbucker - a few neck-mounting mini-humbuckers are available, aimed at jazz guitars.
Piezo bridge pickup - piezoelectric pickups, used on electro-acoustic guitars, are available to fit under the saddle or as complete replacements for archtop bridges.

I'm not sure how well either type of pickup will reproduce this guitar's character so it looks like some experimentation is on the horizon...

For now, all I've done is put some new strings on and give the fingerboard a jolly good clean - getting rid of the serious amount of grime beside the frets and rubbing in some lemon oil to give a bit of life back to the rosewood. See how dry and grimey the fingerboard was before cleaning!

If you've found this page and are interested in archtops, check out Ron Doublet Archtop Guitars - nice stuff!