Nagoya Suzuki Acoustic Guitars: FE200B label

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

FE200B label

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: I have (amazingly) acquired over the last 25 years, two FE200B Suzuki
Three-S guitars.
One was bought in the 70's, and another online recently. I've never
seen any other FE200B guitars,
except in old catalogs, and believe the FE200B is very rare.
Each of my FE200B uitars are every bit as good as the $5,000 guitars.

This model is the best I've ever had in my 50 yrs of playing, and
plays and sounds better
than my friend's 20 yr old Martin.

I put a Matrix internal pickup in each, and play one in the church
band every week,
and play both via a Fender Acoustasonic 150 Amp home.

Your ID code of E must not mean 'Electric' on the acoustic models,
since mine looks like a classic guitar with classical style head and
wide neck, and
pickboard & steel strings. It did not come with electronics.

I do believe F is for Folk, and see '200' as common between the FE200B
and the W200 models.

I'm not sure what the B stands for, but would like to know. I bought
the first one because
I was looking for a classical guitar (wide fingerboard) made to be an
acoustic. I had an
internal brace re-glued on the old one about a year ago, but no other
problems at all.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Tim; July 3, 2012 at 3:35 PM

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.