❌SOLD❌ Hofner 125 London Blonde, 1957

The Hofner 125 ‘London’ model appeared in 1954 with the newly rising interest in amplified music and Rock & Roll. This example dates to 1957 and is complete and original. All the original parts are here, including the pickguard, original strap attachments, and hard shell case. This guitar has recently received a fret dress and setup at The Twelfth Fret Repair Shop, and plays well and cleanly. I would expect that over the last 65 years it has been refretted once or twice.

Close to entry level, the Hofner 125 ‘London’ was a fairly small bodied hollow but sealed chamber arched Spruce top guitar with Maple for the sides and flat back. The neck is also Maple with Rosewood – at the time the word ‘Brazilian’ was silent – for the zero-fret equipped fingerboard. The neck has a full profile and typical of the period does not have an adjustable truss rod. The bridge base and cap are Ebony; the cap is slotted to accept short pieces of fret wire to act as intonatable saddles. The head plate is three sections of plastic – a center faux Mother of Pearl bracketed by faux Tortoise panels. This headstock shape changed soon after to a black head plate with Hofner logo and a vine decoration.

The tuners are the original strip models with creme plastic buttons, and the tailpiece is a standard Hofner part bearing the Hofner crest. The pickguard is the original Faux Tortoise with a white border, supported by a pin from the bridge and a side-mount bracket.

This Hofner 125 London is an electric model, so it has a single Fuma-made type 507 nickel-plated single coil pickup in the neck position and a volume and tone control set on a round plate – replaced with a rectangular plate around 1960- using ‘teacup’ style knobs with gold toned inserts. This electronic setup was found on a number of Hofner models. Fuma made a range of pickup designs and supplied other builders as well as Hofner.

These Hofner 125 London instruments were very common in the UK and throughout Europe in the 1950’s and into the early 1960’s, partly due to stiff import duties on US made instruments. Similar models, but not exactly these models, were used by both George Harrison and John Lennon before shifting to Gretsch and Rickenbacker guitars.