Kona Style 4 Hawaiian

This review concerns the "original" Kona line -- the Hawaiian
lap-slide acoustics designed and built by Chris Knutsen during
the early decades of the 20th century. Those interested in
learning more seek out the recent book by George Noe and
Daniel Most -- "Chris J Knutsen, From Harp Guitars to the
New Hawaiian family."

** Those with Knutsen-era Konas of their own, please post here
as well.

My guitar is an all-koa wood, small-body acoustic, generally
played with a slide while placed in the player's lap.
It was made at some point in the early 1920's, based
on the style of inner label, the overall design, etc.
My guess is 1923, but Mr. Noe, who collects these
guitars (and who literally "wrote the book") tells me that
mine is likely to be older than that.
The "style-4" refers to the level of decoration. A style 4
has "rope" binding (alternating white and dark wood inlay,
meant to resemble a twisted rope) along both the top and
bottom edges (where they meet the sides) as well as along
both sides of the neck, and around the top edge of the
headstock. Mine has mother-of-pearl inlays, in diamond,
dual-diamond, round, dual-round, and triangular shapes,
depending on fret position. One of the diamonds is missing.
I've described the guitar to Mr. Noe by phone; he tells me
that this is a relatively rare configuration.
The tuners are inexpensive, open-geared, six-in line, with
white plastic-looking knobs.
If you find Noe's book, page 93 has a picture of a Style 3,
which looks quite a bit like my instrument, except that the
binding and inlay are more ornate on mine.
I'm not going to rate things here -- just hoping to get
some other folks interested in leaving reviews of these
old Konas.

I am currently fixing the bracing on the guitar. It has
a very sweet tone for slack-key Hawaiian slide, though
as a player I hardly do it justice. Once it's back in one
structurally-sound piece, I'll devote more time to playing
it right.
The guitar was given to me as a decoration, and in addition
to a couple of missing braces, it was very dried-out. I
did not want to leave it strung to pitch for too long, for
fear of pulling it apart at its dry glue joints. It already
has two small, fixable body cracks.

The exterior of the guitar has a beautiful, if sloppy,
hand-built quality to it -- nobody made these parts on
CNC cutting machines! Mr. Noe informs me that this
is a hallmark of all Knutsen guitars. There is some sloppy
glue work internally, and the inlay work is slightly
erratic. There are pencil marks internally, which are
sometimes attributed to Hermann Weissenborn (maker of the
most famous of the Hawaiian guitars) who produced Konas in
his factory from about 1923 on. Some of the pencil marks were for
alignment during brace installation, while others were batch and
style designations. Guitars marketed as Weissenborns look quite
a bit like Konas, but have a hollow neck to serve as an
amplification chamber.
Page 110 of Darcy Kuronen's book "Dangerous Curves" has a
great picture of a Weissenborn Style 4, while the George Gruhn /
Walter Carter book "Acoustic Guitars" has both Weissenborn
and Kona Style 4's pictured on page 153. Both of these books,
as well as the Noe / Most book, are excellent sources of
pictures of all sorts of interesting instruments.

(By the way: I'm not a book dealer -- I just bought two
of the books while researching this guitar; the third,
Dangerous Curves, came from an exhibit of all sorts of
guits at the Boston Museum Of Fine Arts.)

Well, it's about 80 years old, and fragile as hell. It's
gonna be fun to play once it's fixed, though. Still, playing
it live would be like dragging your 95-year old great
grandmother with osteoporosis out for some skydiving.

Mr. Knutsen died in 1930, so you will have a hard time
reaching him. He made some very beautiful instruments, though.
Harp guitars, ukes, you name it.

Very cool to have such an artifact just drop into one's
lap, as it were. Too bad the previous owner used it as a
decoration over the fireplace (!) That's about the worst
possible place to leave an antique guitar -- talk about
drying it out... The hide glue (yeah, horse hide) is
extremely brittle, and there are a few bits I'll need
to fabricate, but this is one sweet little guitar.

Who else out there has one? Ben Harper, for sure. Mr. Noe
as well. Let's hear from some others if you're out there.

Check out Mr. Noe's web site (from memory, I'm going to say
noe-enterprises.com -- that may not be exact, but it's close.)