I’m opening a thread on this guitar copying and pasting my first post in another thread, sorry for that. Hopefully we can gather useful information on this specific guitar in this thread.
Hi there, recently I bought a Hohner Professional ST 57 in not perfect condition but still not too bad. I did some online research but couldn’t find a lot of information on it, or it wasn’t correct. For example, I read somewhere that its neck is supposed to have a 12" radius but it seems to be a 9.5" and perhaps multiradius (combined with not sure what).
I’m swapping pickups sometime soon, and I’l try to level the neck pocket for it’s painted and there are blobs of paint here and there. Also the neck seems to have a bit of deviation. Other than that it could be a fine instrument… OK, the frets are worn out and are being leveled now although I might just have them replaced with medium jumbo.
The serial number sticker is partially gone, but I can almost see the numbers engraved in remaining lower layer of the sticker, and it seems to be made in 1986, A 33 year old guitar! cool!
Any information on frets would be much appreciated.
So the serial number is 8618342, which tells me that its year of production is 1986, however I have no clue of where it was made. Germany? Czech Republic? Austria? Korea? China? Was it made by Cort or Hohner themselves?
Hi Jatetu!
The ST 57 was made from 1985 to1993 in Korea.
More infrrormation in the ST 57 you can find on the list of histrorical models in the HOHNER homepage service area: Guitars
There is no more guitar expertise among the current company team. The guitar experts left when HOHNER decided to withdraw from the guitar business.
Hope to find anybody else around who has some insights!
Well, so even if they are not all that horrible and they have their personality, I’m planning on swapping the pickups with some “custom” ones coming from Russia with love (and with a big delay too, I must say).
The past weeks I removed the neck only to find a lot of paint including some noticeable blobs in the neck pocket. I even it out a bit with a blade and had the frets leveled. TBH the job is far from being perfect but it plays better now. It CAN be a nice guitar if properly set up.
I have also bleached pickguard and knobs, for they were yellowish and one of them almost orange. The peroxide cream (hair volume developer or something) worked wonders on it. I had replaced the pickup covers with new ones but they don’t fit perfectly, so I applied the same cleaning process to the original ones and now they look nice… but I guess (I hope!) I’ll receive the new pickups soon so I will just swap the whole thing.
Probably because they are ceramic pickups the pots are 500k. they are the tiny variant, not “full size”, and after 30+ years on the pickguard they still work well, I think. Maybe one tone is a bit scratchy.
What else, what else… oh yeah, I should learn to play instead of just playing up and down my scales…
Hi Jatetu. I have the same guitar but left-handed. I have neglected it horribly, but it still plays OK. You’ve inspired me to restore it. Yours look great. I’m sure mine had a sticker (now fallen off) which said it was made in Japan.
