Mini Project: 1969 Hofner Western Acoustic Restoration

I'll update the Gouzouki project shortly but, in the meantime, a new mini-project has broken out. After selling one ‘surplus to requirements’ guitar, a complete nostalgia purchase has been made!

This 1969 Hofner 489 Western acoustic is very similar to the first half-reasonable guitar I owned when I was about 15.

Here's a scan of the 1969 Hofner catalogue:

Good things: it’s very original, apart from replacement tuners and is overall in quite good nick, with 50 years of ‘patina’ (or battle scars!) Not much wear on fingerboard and frets.

Bad things: it’s filthy! The tuners have been really poorly fitted; the action is very high.

The good thing is though that it (allegedly) has an adjustable neck angle mechanism, so hopefully that will improve the action a lot and then it will just be a case of re-fitting the tuners properly and a good deep clean.

4mm action at the 12th fret is about 2mm too much! The screw under the neck acts as a rake angle adjuster and also a quick release mechanism when you unscrew it all the way out. Clever German design.

The adjuster wouldn’t bring the angle down enough to improve the action so off with the strings and I’ve popped the neck off, which took less than 5 minutes!

The top of the soundboard is detached from the neck block so I’ll glue that up and then see if I can work out why the rake angle won’t come down.

For those with a techie head, this diagram shows how the arrangement works. Basically, as you screw the screw (9) in, it pushes on the lever (4) and the other end (6) pulls the neck (1) back and down. Because it pivots around the pin (3), that changes the angle.

Glueing up where the soundboard has detached from the neck block. I eased open the joint and got some sandpaper into each side of the joint to get rid of the old glue. Then worked some new glue in and clamped it up.

Also I stripped the nasty, poorly installed, ugly gold tuners off so I can clean up properly. I’ve ordered some open gear ones that are much more in keeping with how I remember it in the ‘70s.

I had a quick experiment about restoring some life to the body today. This is probably not standard luthier practice, but I thought I’d try a quick T-Cutting and Turtle Wax! The top half is noticeably a lot glossier than the bottom.

There was a small "puncture" wound in the lower side - only about 6-7mm wide. I was going to leave it, but was a bit worried that it might create a weak area. I pushed as much of the splintered wood back into place from inside and then dropped a bit of superglue into the hollow, followed by a little bit of light sandpaper dust. Then I carefully filed and sanded the small patch back level, before bringing the scratches out with some cutting compound. Again, definitely not standard luthier practice this! It's ended up noticeable but less prominent than the original hole.

I really didn’t like the gold ‘Grover’ style machine heads. These satin silver open gear ones suit the age of the Hofner so much better. And there are no redundant holes now either - the positions were just slightly out, so I filled them all in with superglue and redrilled them.

I also cleaned up the metal bridge and truss rod cover. Starting to look nice at the top end.

Moving on to the fingerboard, a couple of the frets are showing just a little wear but I’m going to see how they play before getting into a fret levelling exercise. I cleaned up the fingerboard and frets with some ultra fine (000?) grade wire wool and then refinished with lemon oil.

The neck has no side marker dots, so I carefully marked out locations and drilled a 2mm hole at each position. A blob of super glue on each hole and then push some 2mm dia plastic into each one, before snipping off just above the surface. Once dry, I used a really sharp craft knife to carefully trim them flush. 

An hour’s cleaning and polishing and that lovely rich spruce and flamed maple are shining through again. Not looking too bad for a 50 year old.

The problem with the high action was a bit of play that had built up over years in the adjusting mechanism. I just needed to add a small shim of wood (red line in the picture below) under the base of the neck to stop it pivoting around the adjuster and that’s allowed me to get a nice playable action.

Strung up with some new strings, it sounds very nice. I'm really happy with this - it's extremely playable and I was fully prepared to be quite disappointed with the reality not matching up to my memories from 45 years ago! But I love it. It is never going to sound like a solid wood guitar but has nice depth and tone to it. Looking forward to getting to some festivals and camping trips with this one a lot.

October 2020 update: I have now been playing this guitar for over 4 months and I absolutely adore it. Every time I go to practice, the Hofner is the one that gets pulled down from the wall!

I currently have it tuned down to a Csus2 open tuning (CGCGCD) and it sounds really cool in that. The over-riding quality of it is that it is VERY resonant - notes just go on ringing and ringing, particularly down low. So you could say it has been a big success for an investment of less than £100.

Idly browsing on EBay, I've come across a few for sale recently, mostly in America. Prices ranging from £425 - over £700! But I won't be selling this one anytime soon :-)