Archtop tail piece damage: Binding failure or?

[Kerry Krishna]

I  have been collecting 1930's Kay Kraft two points for close to a year now. Each one of the seven I have bought has had it's own problems. I started a Facebook Kay Kraft Guitar page if anyone is interested and already on Facebook. The guitar we have here today is a '31- 12 fret mahogany  6 string. All of these mahogany model and vintage ,if strung up to pitch these last 80 years, display this problem, along with a few other quite serious ones also. Frank et 'al, what do you think? Is this just a binding problem? Or if you can see the crack/distortion in the top right between the steel arms, is the endblock slowly failing? I have been trying to figure this out for a while, and am posting this to gain some adult supervision. Keep in mind also that all the 12 frets of this vintage are the exact same. Hide glue was used, if that makes any difference. Thanks Folks!

[Frank Ford]

Naturally there are differences in the celluloid binding from batch to batch.  We see old guitars from certain years in which the binding all disintegrates while earlier and later examples from the same maker don't

 

That said, both the photos you posted yesterday show similar, but less severe distortion of the binding under the tailpiece.

[Pierre-Antoine Roiron]

About the 14/12 fret problem, would it be possible that, considering the geometrical differences (2" longer and a break angle maybe different), the forces or the torque applied on the tailpiece are different enough to explain the difference?

Another approach is to say that that critical year, the binding supplier delivered too soft material?

[Joshua Levin-Epstein]

Is the scale length the same for both the 12 and 14 fret models? If the 12 fret is a shorter scale (think OOO vs OM) the added tension of the longer scale might make enough difference to crush the binding.

 

Joshua

 

 

[Kerry Krishna]

Scale length is the same for both, an odd 25.75.