The Acoustic Guitar Forum - View Single Post - Bought A Pair of Vintage Yamahas, An FG-110, and An FG-75

theaxeman · #27 12-07-2011, 02:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ♏artin

Thanks for posting these two vintage Yamaha's. I used to own an FG-75 and it was an extremely nice sounding laminate guitar. For a $100 or so, you can't go wrong.

I ended up selling it because I found the neck to be too chunky for my liking, otherwise I'd still have it.

I paid $150.00 for the FG-75, and $140 for the FG-110. I don't think I got hurt on either one of them. As I said, they are in excellent condition, straight necks, and low action. I think they were well worth what I paid for them.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zigeuner

My brother and I had a music store in Los Angeles in the 1970's and we were a Yamaha dealer. We sold literally hundreds of FG-75's, 110's, 150's and 180's. They were indeed called "Folk" guitars, thus the "F" in the model. That said, you could play anything on them. The fit and finish on the ones we saw were uniformly good. They even smelled good when they came out of the box!

We used to buy them from the wholesaler in large boxes of ten and twelve and often sold all of them in a week on a sale that we advertised in the L.A. paper. For the first few years they were "Made in Japan" and later they started coming in "Made in China". The Chinese ones were identical to the Japanese-built ones as far as I could tell.

The most common issues we had with them were broken truss rods. It wasn't the instrument's fault, either. Typically a broken truss rod was caused by the owner experimenting with various settings on the truss rod to change the neck relief. I developed a standard procedure to replace the rods which entailed removal of a couple of frets and carefully removing a section of the fingerboard over the neck joint to access the rod for replacement. This is not for the faint of heart. LOL.

Left unmolested and simply played, the FG models were bulletproof. Those Yamahas are neat guitars and are good players.

I have read in other places that adjustment of the truss rod must be done very carefully. Hopefully I'll have a long time before I need to do anything to these 2 beauties.