In 30 years I'd never come across one of these guitars, despite reading of the famous 'plastic guitar' many, many years ago. And now I have a mint one! In its original cardboard box, and with the original hang tag and cord!

Maccaferri was a visonary, especially when it came to the use of plastic. During WW2 Maccaferri’s military contract allowed him to obtain injection molding equipment at a time when most other companies were required to convert operations to producing war items. Maccaferri first turned the woodwind instrument industry on its head, introducing plastic reeds to replace the increasingly difficult-to-obtain natural reeds. Initially the music industry scoffed at the idea that one could manufacture acceptable reeds from plastic, but, of course, the joke was on the nay-sayers. Indeed, Mario’s good friend Benny Goodman quickly became a fan of the plastic reeds and began using them, spearheading their rapid acceptance by many Big Band stars.

The next item in Maccaferri's aim was the humble wooden clothes peg. Yep, you got it. Those plastic pegs we still use today originated from Maccaferri's fertile brain. Maccaferri plastic interior tiles then helped supply the massive post-war housing boom.

Mario Maccaferri invented the Islander plastic ukulele, patterning it after Martin’s style O uke, in 1949.
Maccaferri uke production had begun in 1949 and by the end of the run in 1969 tallied more than 9 million plastic ukulele sales!

The following text is from the Vintage Guitar website (with thanks).

The plastic guitar

Like the plastic clothespin before it, however, the plastic ukulele was merely a stepping stone to Maccaferri’s higher ambition of making a plastic guitar. Let’s face it, ukes hardly represent a great sonic challenge, but making a guitar out of Dow Styron? That’s something else altogether!

The Maccaferri plastic guitar debuted in the Spring of 1953. The introduction was extensively covered by The Music Trades in May of ’53, which reported a press luncheon thrown by Dow Chemical for Mario Maccaferri at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York on April 29, 1953.

Described in glowing terms — lunch must have been great — Maccaferri introduced two guitars and emphasized the resources and cost of developing his new guitars. Indeed, Amos Ruddock of Dow’s plastic merchandising department indicated that the project took two years of testing various formulations of Styron and another Dow plastic called Ethocel and that tooling up cost around $350,000.

The Music Trades quoted Maccaferri’s speech at length. While referring to a painting of legendary violinmaker Antonio Stradivarius working at his bench with a few simple tools, Maccaferri remarked, “A like painting symbolizing such craftsmanship today would have to suggest the following elements: 1. Some idea of the enormous industrial resources and scientific know-how of America today; 2. Not one genius, but a dozen of them; 3. The pile of money necessary to accomplish the task.”

After citing famous musicians and composers, particularly Paganini, who played the guitar for their own personal enjoyment and wrote music for it, Maccaferri continued, “I have always promised myself that one day I would make a good guitar at a popular price. I had no idea that I would end up by making a plastic guitar. But when I realized that plastic would offer me the chance to make a perfect instrument with none of the shortcomings known in the wooden guitar, it did not take long to decide and satisfy my life’s ambition. So, I went to work.

“Often in my lifetime of playing guitar, I have had disappointments in its performance. On many occasions I would find the instrument’s neck warped or the fretting defective, or the body of the instrument expanded or contracted, caused by humidity or dryness; thus making my guitar simply unplayable. Anyone playing the guitar knows what I mean.

“Although today’s fine wooden guitars are the result of 300 years of guitar making experience, I do not hesitate to say that our 1953 all-plastic guitar compares favorably with any wooden guitar made.

“This all-plastic guitar wasn’t an easy job, as you will understand. We had a lot of engineering problems and it represents quite a costly venture for us, but the Dow Chemical Company came up with suitable materials and we overcame the other problems. To this instrument we have applied all the improvements that guitar players have been seeking in it for many years. It has beauty and it is easier to play — it produces music in perfect pitch, and it has good tone and plenty of it. And this all-plastic guitar is not subject to any of the shortcomings mentioned earlier.”

Heavyweight support

It might surprise you to learn that Maccaferri brought his plastic guitar to the world bearing the endorsements of none other than classical maestros Andres Segovia, his old friend from the Twenties, and Rey De La Torre, and pop-jazz great Harry Volpe. De La Torre and Volpe attended the luncheon and performed on Maccaferri guitars, making the guitar “speak for itself,” after which Maccaferri himself was prevailed upon to toss up a “lively Neopolitan melody with skill and dexterity.”

G30 and G40

The two guitars Maccaferri introduced at the Waldorf were described as “full, master size instruments,” “the flat-top, arched bottom, cutaway model retailing at $29.95; and the DeLuxe Arched Top at $39.95.” While the denomination is strange, it’s these which would quickly be known as the G30 and G40, respectively. Both had similar, Selmer-like shapes with the Maccaferri square cutaway, the former with a flat top, the latter with an arched top. Pictured in the article are Maccaferri and Volpe getting down with a pair of plastics, Maccaferri on a G30, and Volpe holding a striking version of what looks like a G40 with an ivory (a.k.a. “maple”) fingerboard. These are quite remarkable pieces of technology, each composed of more than 100 separate parts, not all plastic, to be truthful.

Both had fancy headstocks with Maccaferri’s patented planetary tuning machines. These were “banjo” style tuners with a 14:1 ratio, a patented design using three interlocking gears. The G30 had a molded-in bridge assembly to which the strings attached and a separate plastic saddle glued in. The G40 had a glued-on archtop-style bridge and a fancy trapeze tailpiece. Both had two f-holes. Curiously enough, wooden struts were glued under the tops. The tops were ivory, the sides and backs done up in a swirled reddish-brown rosewood color. Both were, by the way, steel-stringed guitars, not nylon stringed instruments like the Islander ukes. One point to note: early G30s had only the molded bridge assembly. Some time later a plain metal trapeze tailpiece was added. This did not serve as the anchor for the strings, but either as some sort of added support for the bridge assembly or as merely decoration.

The most curious design elements concerned the neck. The neck was bolted on the guitar in an early version of a slightly cutaway heel. The outside of the neck consisted of two pieces of plastic, the outer back and the fingerboard. The fingerboard bore actual frets and white position markers (which are actually part of the back and how the parts are aligned). Inside there’s a metal sheath, referred to as an “armored neck,” and at the core a piece of wood. This design was guaranteed never to warp.

Already we’ve described a pretty interesting bit of guitar design, but wait, there’s more! This neck was essentially a neck-through design. The inner core ran all the way through the body to the endpin. There it was notched and had a threaded bolt running perpendicular to it. This bolt had a couple nuts above and below the neck core and was slotted. By removing a metal plug from a hole on the top of the guitar down at the bottom of the lower bout, you can use a screwdriver and basically adjust neck tilt and therefore action by tightening or loosening this bolt!

OK, we have a plastic guitar with a warp-proof neck, perfect intonation, adjustable action and pretty natty faux-rosewood looks. Let’s cut to the chase. How does it sound? Well, beauty is in the ear of the beholder, but in my opinion pretty good, indeed. The tone is not really like a typical wood sound. In some ways it’s sort of like an acoustic variant of the Strat’s out-of-phase sound, kind of funky. In a good one, the balance and sustain are quite remarkable. Of those I’ve personally played, I’ve found the newer ones to have better sound, and I prefer the tone of the flattop G30 to the more upscale archtop G40. If I were a recording artist, I’d consider a G30 as an indispensable part of my studio arsenal, and would never apologize for the tone.

So there you have it! A New Old Stock Maccaferri, with its original hang tag, cord, and even its original cardboard box!

Sold to Chris in Queensland

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