Hi I wonder if anyone can identify the year of manufacture of my hohner? It looks quite old and fair conditions but needs the neck adjusting. Thanks, Andy
Hi Andy,
HG380J is likely to be the model designation. In order to find the year of production, we’d need the serial number of the individual instrument, please provide.
Cheers
Steve
It’s likely to be early 1970s.
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Hi Steve thanks for getting back to me so promptly. Here is an image from inside the guitar.
It looks tricky to understand!
There are no other numbers or markings aside from the label I’ve sent or this one……
Certainly is tricky to understand, I can’t decipher that. I couldn’t locate the exact model HG 380 in my list either, but the HG series was mostly built between 1978 and 1985 in Korea.
Cheers
Steve
Hi Steve,
The HG designation goes back to the 1960s and probably originated with Hohner US. Guitar models were HG, banjos were HB, and strings were HS. Hohner London took a lot of the Hohner US models but if they sourced their own guitars, they often stuck with the HG designation.
Winston Guitars was actually just a brand name used by the US wholesaler Buegeleisen and Jacobson. Their better known brand was Kent, which were mostly budget electric guitars. They had the guitars made by multiple factories in Japan during the 1960s, but then seem to have started sourcing Korean guitars in the early 1970s, probably because one of their existing suppliers had moved production there (Kawai is a candidate).
So it seems like Hohner London made a deal to rebadge “WInston” guitars and I think the likeliest timeframe for these (based on Hohner and Winston history) is around 1971-1973. I’ve also seen an HG390H with an otherwise identical label.
Thanks Phil! My source for the info on the HG series doesn’t mention the earlier history, but the available documentation of guitar models from a range of different factories marketed by Hohner over many decades is patchy at best.
Tell me about it. 
The oldest document I have with the H prefix models is actually a strings price list from 1968. But that implies that guitars were using similar name formats by that point. And there is a 1969 catalogue with guitars and banjos using the HG and HB prefixes.
I didn’t realise Hohner USA and UK commissioned so many guitars in the 1960s and 70s. When I started working for Hohner Germany in 1985, they’d just begun their cooperation with Cort. Product management was in the hands of No.1 Guitar Center in Hamburg, who set up the deal with Cort and also arranged for Hohner to license the Steinberger hardware. This went on until at least the mid-1990s and produced a large number of high quality mid price instruments, many of which represent great deals today.