My first guitar which I got in 1969 for about $75. Actually a re-branded Harmony H165. This guitar always sounded great but the action was rather high.Found this site which shows the Harmony H165 and this site which has this exact model. It has solid mahogany top, back, and sides. It originally had Waverly 3 on a plate tuning machines but sometime in the 70's I replaced them with some open gear Grover's.
Eventually the neck got so out of wack that it was not playable so I added a filed down nail to the nut to raise it even more and I just play it with a slide. For a while I used a Dean Markley pickup so I could play electric slide. This worked for a few years but eventually the guitar just sat in the closet.
Over the years I took it in to a couple of guitar shops to see if it could be repaired and the answer was always "It's not worth fixing". Sure it was a cheap guitar to begin with, but it was my first guitar which I learned to play so many songs on. So it sat in my guitar closet in my garage just waiting for the day.
Then in the fall of 2019 I discovered a series of guitar repair videos on YouTube by Jerry Rosa. Jerry makes custom mandolins as Rosa Sting Works, has a bluegrass band, and repairs all manner of stringed instruments. His videos are very well done and make working on guitars approachable. So after watching him do a neck reset a couple of dozen times I pulled out my old guitar and gave it a go. Call it beginners luck but it came out really good. This guitar now plays better than ever before and sounds as sweet as ever.
