With the popularity of surf bands – especially The Ventures – taking hold in the late 1960’s, Mosrite guitars started gaining traction. Soon there were many knockoffs coming from Japan, these two with the Silvertone brand. It was a simple, solid body design, with the Mosrite body shape and featuring the slanted pickup mount. But this one had three pickups with individual on/off switches, making it 50% better than the Mosrite. Not! Bolt-on neck with zero fret, truss rod access in the heel and a crazy long tremolo arm. All in all a pretty good budget version of the real deal with great tone. This model also came in 2 pickup versions, another version with slider volume and tone knobs, and for some reason different headstock shapes were available. I am not 100%, but I think this was due to different import companies. So for example, Sears in USA had a different headstock than Sears in Canada. You can also find the identical guitar with alternate branding, such as Kawai.
Vintage 1960’s Silvertone Mosrite Electric Guitar
Here’s the original description from the 1969 Sears catalog:
Solid Body Electric Guitars Triple pickup (7 combinations). Three pickup selector switches. Solo selector switch for quick tone changes. Vibrato tailpiece produces Hawaiian and other special effects. Roller-type bridge adjusts. Ebony fingerboard. Edge-bound body. Highly-polished flame sunburst yellow, shaded to red, shaded to mahogany color. With vinyl-covered lined chipboard case. 1445L–Shpg. wt. 14lbs. $5 monthly. Cash $78.95 2 x 13 7/8 x 41 1/4 in.
I’ve got one of these exact same guitars with the six-inline headstock. The only thing missing is the bridge cover plate. It needs a little TLC (the frets are REALLY low, and the vibrato tailpiece needs a new spring) but otherwise, the neck is dead-straight, and everything still works great.
Dear sir ,
I am looking for a price list of the complete guitar (mdel ) for export
I hope to hear from you soon.
Thank you
Rest Regards
Daniel
all pricing is at http://www.eastwoodguitars.com
I have one of these that I stupidly painted white. Was never a sunburst fan. I likely did a crap job, so the original might be under there somewhere…
The neck is very straight. I once took it out of the case after not playing it for years and it was sitll in tune. Had to replace the pick ups because all the originals did was feedback. I’d like to refurbish the one I have one day.
This guitar is the best Mostite copy ever due to the fact that, unlike many others such as Eastwood, it has a 25″ scale length, small fretwires plus a zero fret (necessary to accomplish low action), a thin Basswood body, and a single coil pickup close to the bridge. NOTE: the electronics in this guitar suck- for the best Mosrite like sound, I highly recommed bypassing everything and rewiring the bridge pickup right to the jack. I only use the bridge pickup and speaking of which, I recently replaced the original pickup with an “RH-100” pickup from M3 California for like $130. WHOAH, it now sounds exactly I mean EXACTLY like a Mosrite Mark 1, wow! Only thing with that is if you do that you’ll have to have the pickguard routed out & made a little larger and the wood inside the guitar also routed. I tried doing this myself, what a mess- and that wood smells really bad.
I dont suppose you can take a picture of the wiring can you? ….I have the same guitar but the wiring came all modified and I cant get it back to normal!!!