Epiphone's Version of the Gibson Melody Maker

This early single cutaway (like Gibson's Melody Maker) solid body guitar weighs just 6.50 lbs. and has a nice, fat nut width of over 1 11/16 inches and a scale length of 24 3/4 inches. Solid mahogany body, one-piece mahogany neck with a wonderful medium-to-thick profile. Brazilian rosewood fretboard with 22 original medium jumbo frets and inlaid pearl dot position markers. Narrow headstock with gold silk-screened "Epiphone" logo which reads upside-down to player. Open-back strip tuners with white plastic buttons. Serial number "19401" stamped in black on back of headstock. Two Gibson Melody Maker-style single-coil pickups with height adjstment screws and outputs of 7.02k and 6.95k. Tortoiseshell pickguard with nine screws. Four controls (two volume, two tone) plus three-way selector switch, all on pickguard. The potentiometers are stamped "134 6043" and "134 6102" (Centralab October 1960 and January 1961). Gold plastic bell-shaped knobs with metal tops. Combination "wrap-over" bridge/tailpiece with two adjustable 'intonation' screws. This guitar is in near mint (9.25) condition, with just a couple of tiny marks on the edges. Housed in the original Epiphone gray softshell case with blue felt lining (8.75).

The Epiphone solid-body range of the early sixties were all made at Gibson's Kalamazoo factory and shared many of the features of Gibson's solid body guitars including hardware, pickup configurations, body and neck woods, construction and controls. The Epiphone Olympic was Epiphone's best selling (Kalamazoo made) guitar with a total of almost 10,000 instruments being shipped between 1960 and 1969. The Olympic was introduced in 1960 with a single cutaway solid body. In 1963, it became an asymmetrical double cutaway body with the upper bass horn slightly longer than the treble horn.