Silvertone 1487 Amp-in-Guitar

Sounds like the same guitar as R Haines has , but seems all dark brown, not metal flake. Came in orig. gig bag with paper, including wiring schematic, zipper needs work. Has sticky decal on rear of body, says SILVER TONE .[two words] chassis no.381.14870

The wires were twisted off the controls inside, now the guitar works through an amp, but I need to check out the amp part, takes two 9 v batteries Through a small Kustom amp I have it sounds very good to me, even with the one pick-up near the neck. I basically play your basic power chords, some finger picking, I guess a mixture of styles I like, {I'm 50}, It has a nice, bright sound, can get a chunky sound, if wanted, Would be probably be well suited for the beach parties it was probably intended for ! Can't wait to get the amp working ,

Made well in general for a low end guitar, needs some fret work, etc.

A tank, when all is said and done, Love this old jewel, It may look wierd, but so do I, I'm looking foward to playing this thing out sometime.

Years ago I has an old Silvertone from the 60's Cheap, great guitar, not amp in guitar, wonderful neck, probably worth a mint now, Knew I had to like this one.

Cool guitar !

Made in Japan by Teisco in 1965, this guitar is one of nature's mistakes! Not to be confused with the DanElectro-made "amp-in-the-case" models, this is the Teisco-made "amp-in-the-guitar" model, sold through Sears Roebuck as a "Silvertone".

It has 22 frets. The body and neck woods are indeterminable, as both were dipped (!) at the factory in deep brown metalflake paint. If I had to guess, I'd say the wood feels like a fairly heavy tropical hardwood. The fretboard looks like Brazilian rosewood with novel plastic markers, and the frets are brass. There is one single-coil pickup in a cheesy faux-humbucker housing, with individual pole screws.

Here's where it gets weird: the pickup feeds a 9v. battery-powered transistorized amp built into a cavity in the body, and drives a 4-inch speaker mounted under the pickguard. The pickguard itself is a huge slab of 1/8" thick aluminum. Due to the size and location of the speaker (just to the treble side of the tailpiece), the body has a gruesome asymmetrical shape -- kind of like a melting Telecaster. The speaker is so deep that it sticks through the back of the body 1/8" or so, and so has a domed chrome cover plate that mounts over it. There is a switch to select between the on-board amp and external amplification, and tone and volume knobs, all located on the bass side of the strings.

The bridge is one of the odder ones I've seen: a "U"-shaped steel rod fitted through a 1/2" diameter rod, hinged under a plate, holds the strings and is adjusted with two setscrews. Needless to say, intonation is farcical. The tuners were cheep and sloppy, so I've put on some Grovers that look similar but have much better accuracy. The neck is fat and solid with an adjustible truss rod, but the shallow bolt-on mounting is none too reassuring.

On the other hand, the whole point of this thing (beyond frightening old folks) was to have a 'lectrick geetar that didn't need an amp, so for that alone, I've got to give it a big boost in its "features rating".

My playing is a chunky rhythm style, and my music style is sort of like Stereolab doing covers of The Free Design or the Strawberry Alarm Clock. I'd like to think that there is a place in my playing for this guitar, but maybe I just feel sorry for it.

This thing sounds mighty strange. I don't know what to attribute it to, but it sounds like it has a built-in distortion circuit. Very "chewy". It also hums like a school PA system. I'll try introducing it to some wire shielding to see if that helps. There's something disfunctional with the on-board amp, so I run it into one of my small old tube amps until I can troubleshoot the amp.

If I can tame the hum and get the damn thing to play in tune, I have a feeling that it'll sound pretty good, but in the meantime, the "sound rating" is dismal.

For all it's weirdness, it's actually pretty sturdily made, and the finish isn't bad, especially considering it's 35 years old. Unfortunately, the worst thing about the guitar is the action, which is unforgivably high. Intonation is almost impossible to achieve. I'll keep fiddling around with shimming the neck and tweaking the tailpiece setscrews, but I'm not optomistic. Beyond that, the hum is a real problem.

Mr. Scale says that the guitar weighs in at a hefty 6 or 7 pounds. It's pretty solid and very overbuilt. Would I gig with it? If I can correct the aforementioned problems, I think I'll write a song just for it, and perform it with the on-board speaker mic'd. But that's my weirdness.

1. "Hah!"
2. see above

The manual says that it comes with a 5-year warranty on its transistors. How many guitars can claim that?!

I've been playing off and on for 22 years, and a couple of years ago I started picking up weird orphan guitars. I have a 1966 Harmony Silhouette, a Kay bass, a Galiano acoustic archtop and a DanElectro 1558 "amp-in-the-case" guitar. I use old Harmony, a Silvertone and DanElectro small tube amps, each of them somewhere between 4 and 7 watts. I also have about a dozen vintage analog effects, mostly US-made Ross boxes.

If this guitar were stolen would I buy another? Well, I'd want to meet the person strange enough to want to steal it, and maybe offer them a place in my band! But, no -- I don't think I'd buy another. Getting this one was a whim come true, and to repeat a whim is folly. Still, I got way more than $90 of weird with this thing, so I'd have to say that it was good value for money.

If you're curious enough to want to see this thing, I've put up a picture at http://hedonia.net/ebay/weirdo-tone.jpg