Nagoya Suzuki Acoustic Guitars: F120 headstock

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

F120 headstock

2 comments:

Matthias said...: I´m working in a small guitar store and recently a guy came with a Suzuki F120 in poor condition. After the cleaning job and restring the guitar came back to life and is sounding great now. I bought it for myself.

The sound quality is just amazing for a guitar made of laminated wood!
I own a well played D18...; May 19, 2011 at 1:56 PM
Unknown said...: I recently found an F-120 in a storage and brought it back to life. There was one machine head missing, and because I couldn't find an original one as a spare I had to replace all of them with generic open machine heads. It sounds great. However, as it doesn't have a serial number it's impossible to guess the date or even year of manufacturing. Or am I overlooking something? Here's a few photos of it. I can add more if needed to help identify it.
https://goo.gl/photos/KPJK2226Aozx4X9t9; December 19, 2016 at 2:47 AM

Older Nagoya Suzuki acoustics...

Many people have posed this question to me about their older Nagoya Suzuki...Am I supposed to have steel strings or nylon strings on this guitar?

On some of the older models: the #6,7,9,12, and 18, the answer is not immediately obvious, since all these models have slotted headstocks like a classical, and the saddle in the bridge is like a classical...not angled (compensated) like an acoustic steel-string. But they have truss rods like an acoustic.

The answer is: steel!

I have an old Suzuki brochure that describes these guitars and it says they were steel stringed-guitars. Although some people put nylon strings on them, they were made for steel. So don't be afraid to put steel strings on them.

A couple of observations: I took apart a #18 (lost pictures when hard-drive crashed)...removed the top and found out it was ladder-braced, and I assume so are the other older models mentioned. Ladder bracing was an old way of internal bracing steel-string guitars. All these too are laminate tops.
Also, the fret-board on the #18 was flat, not radiused like most other steel strings (same with the other models I'm assuming).
The rosette was faux-MOP or nylon, which also goes with an acoustic model.
The headstock rollers are thinner than classical rollers.

I changed the bracing to a fan-braced top and put in tone bars ala Overholtzer book on classical guitar-making.

I didn't have any purling so I replaced the top binding with pieces of straight inlay pieces and glued them in.

The end result was nice and jangly. I liked it, but being new to the setup work I didn't put in enough relief so the strings buzzed a bit, though the saddle was very high and action was low.