Maccaferri Islander G16 Guitar 1950s — No Cracks, Orig Box

No sales tax for US customers outside California.

The Maccaferri plastic ukulele is well known. Nine million of them sold, Arthur Godfrey endorsed it on television, and uke players have been hunting clean examples ever since. The Maccaferri plastic guitar is an entirely different story — far rarer, far less understood, and in the estimation of many serious collectors, one of the most fascinating instruments ever manufactured in America.

Mario Maccaferri introduced his plastic guitar line in 1953, four years after the Islander ukulele made him famous. Where the uke had been conceived as an affordable starter instrument, the guitars were intended as something else entirely — a serious alternative to wood for professional players, engineered to eliminate the acoustic sensitivities that plague wooden instruments in changing humidity and temperature. Maccaferri had spent years designing guitars for Selmer in Paris — the same guitars Django Reinhardt made immortal — and he brought that luthier's intelligence to every detail of the plastic guitar's construction. The adjustable neck angle, the precisely molded and integrated fretboard, the zero fret for playability, the Dow Styron material chosen specifically for its acoustic properties after months of testing alternatives — none of this was toy thinking. Guitarists didn't listen. They rejected the idea of a plastic guitar almost on principle, sales were slow, and Maccaferri eventually stopped production in 1969. He had a warehouse full of unsold guitars. Compared to nine million ukuleles, the guitars were made in small numbers and survive in smaller ones still.

This is a G16 — the base model of the Islander guitar line, a six-string flattop in the ivory and dark marble Styron colorway with a 13.75" short scale length and 34.5" overall length. The body, neck, and fretboard are entirely Styron, injection molded in Maccaferri's signature construction: the fret and dot-marker spine formed first as a single integrated unit, then over-molded with the body material to create a fingerboard. Friction metal pegs with ivory plastic buttons, original plastic bridge and pickguard, all intact. At 3 lbs 0.5 oz this is a featherweight instrument.

Styron polystyrene is brittle — it does not flex, it snaps — and decades of temperature changes have split an enormous percentage of surviving Maccaferri guitars. A crack-free example in excellent condition is genuinely uncommon. This one is clean throughout, and the original Mastro box is intact, which completes it as a collector's piece that tells the full story of one of the most ambitious and misunderstood instruments in American guitar history. Jack White plays one. Dave Grohl has owned one.

SPECS:

• Color: Ivory / Dark Marble
• Weight: 3lbs 0.5oz
• Top: Styron Plastic
• Body: Styron Plastic
• Neck: Styron Plastic
  
• Fretboard: Styron Plastic
• Inlays: Dot
• Frets: Original
• Fret Count: 18 + zero fret
• Nut: Original
• Nut width: 1-5/8"
  
• Scale: 13.75"
  
• Neck thickness at 1st Fret: .97"
• Neck thickness at 10th Fret: 1.05"
• Action 1st String at 12th Fret: 4/32"
• Action 6th String at 12th Fret: 4/32"
• Overall length: 34-1/2"
• Body length: 16-5/8"
• Lower bout: 12-3/4"
• Waist: 8-1/4"
• Upper bout: 9-1/2"
• Body depth/thickness: 3-1/12"
• Pickguard: Original
• Bridge: Original Plastic
• Tuners: Metal friction pegs with ivory plastic buttons
• Case: Box
• Notes: 

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