Still looking for information about Bucolo

AndyW

I steamed the neck butt-joint apart and straightened the bowed neck with a couple of carbon fire rods, refret is done - tricky in the soft pearwood (?) fingerboard - but I still need to level & crown. I'm trying a bolt-on conversion to correct the neck angle, final angle adjustments with strings on (then glue down the fingerboard extension).

I'm still convinced mine is a P.Bucolo, I'm fairly sure the rare "Ikea Klumpa" guitars were actually made by Busato...

ChrisMartin

Not that it is a priority just yet, but mine needs much the same amount of work. A slight neck bow needs fixing and I will probably go the carbon route, although mine does have a rosewood fingerboard at least (I had a Sonora with a pearwood board, and yes it can be a bit flaky). I have to fix a couple of minor splits in the top (easy), soundhole decoration (not so easy)and find why the heel block moved (major surgery). The fingerboard extension and the top around the soundhole have all 'sunk' but the neck to body butt joint is still tight, so it looks as if the heel block has moved inside allowing string tension to pull the neck forward and down if that makes sense.
Now I am writing about it and having read your latest adventures in luthiery it has inspired me to at least take it apart this weekend to see where I need to go next.....what the hell, its raining anyway.
I might even take some photos.
As for the Ikea/Busato/Bucolo connection you may be closer than you thought. In that excellent story on Pierre Fontaine in Vintage Vertigo (translation available by request) it is revealed that not only did he make most of Busato's cheaper guitars from the '50s but he says Pierre Bucolo was one of his best customers. So our Bucolos may have been made by Fontaine who also made a lot of Busatos.
Research continues.............

AndyW

And the Bucolo(?) / Napoli(?) is up & running: the clock/painting is a guitar once again ;-)
Still some finishing work to do, I'll post a wee video once its 100% sorted.
.
<edit>
- I am getting the authentic "Klumpa klumpa klumpa klump"
rhythm sound from it ;-)

ChrisMartin

https://www.djangobooks.com/forum/discussion/comment/97597#Comment_97597

Finally got around to fixing the Bucolo and this is what the neck joint looked like once I removed the fingerboard, yours was missing the dovetail completely.......

buc02.JPG

ChrisMartin

Still having trouble loading photos; here goes another try.....Finally got around to fixing the Bucolo and this is what the neck joint looked like once I removed the fingerboard, yours was missing the dovetail completely.......

ah yes, that worked.

So while I am winning I may as well add another showing after the carbon rod was routed and glued in.

mac63000

Looks like such a fun project! Are you going to keep the original hardware? Refinishing?

ChrisMartin

Yes, all done now. I posted that photo to show that once I had removed the fingerboard there was an obvious dovetail joint on mine whereas Andy W had previously posted photos of his showing what appeared to be a plain glued butt joint. We had thought these were the same guitar by the same maker but there is a big difference in construction.

As for mine, yes I removed the back to reglue a brace, cleat a couple of cracks, reglued the heel block in the right place, straightened the neck, reinforced with a carbon fibre rod, reglued the fingerboard and refinished the body by cleaning and sanding old flaky finish (it was rather tired), using a few coats of shellac to fill the grain again and add sheen then a couple of coats of nitro to add a protective finish.

Then all the frets needed was a light crown and polish and I refitted all of the original hardware; the bridge, tailpiece and scratchplate. I refitted the tuners too (I don't know if they were original, probably were going by the fact that there was no sign of any old screw holes), but a couple of them were so stiff it was hard to tune so I replaced them with a generic set.

With a 43mm nut width and a scale length of 622mm it is smaller than most, light weight and very easy to play with a bright clear tone; I doubt Michael would describe it as a 'cannon' but there is enough volume for normal use.

But....we still have not got to the bottom of who made these guitars?

Maybe it was even Pierre Bucolo himself, possibly Carmelo Catania, or most likely from what I have found, Pierre Fontaine made the body and neck and he, or Bucolo fitted the hardware which look more typical of Italian guitars so possibly were imported? The reference to Catania on the label could be a red-herring, either just a reference to Bucolo's origins, or possibly, as I had read sometime ago, that if a guitar was pretending to made in Italy it could be imported and sold without any import tariff.

Or they could have thought just to add some pizzaz where French players thought a foreign guitar must be better than a French one, much the same as Jacobacci's being labelled as Jose Sanchez from Spain for a Lyon retailer.

Oh the mysteries,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

AndyW

Chris - re. my posts of Feb 1st - - are you not buying my ""P. Bucolo- Catania" = "Antonino Napoli - Catania" possibility ??

- that little Chitarra is surely out of the same "former" / same workshop, despite the cats-eye f-holes ??

ChrisMartin

https://www.djangobooks.com/forum/discussion/comment/99465#Comment_99465

I agree one can see a similarity but I am not convinced. The shape of the cutaway and the rounded shoulder does look similar but the Napoli appears to be longer and narrower overall.  That may be just an optical distortion due to the different soundholes or colours too, so you may be right.  Then again, ownership of a shape, a mould or former is not proof of anything either, I am certain many shared designs came from different makers (maybe some luthiers even made and sold the moulds on) I have a stack of mdf profiles in the shed taken directly from a Di Mauro that I will get around to using one day to make my own, of course they will not be Di Mauro guitars.

So, what do we have so far?

The Antonio Napoli connection is one possibility; of course Carmelo Catania must be another. The tailpiece on yours, and the different one on mine, both are common to Sicilian guitars, and mine has the little white decorative strips on the ends of the bridge also typical of Sicily and both parts are often seen on Carmelo Catania guitars.

I can't explain why mine has a dovetail neck joint and yours was a bolt-on butt joint on what appear otherwise to be very similar guitars.  My only thought about that is that other often told old story about how many of the Sicilian luthiers, certainly those in Paris, far from being competitors, used to make and supply parts for each other, swapping bodies and necks as and when needed to keep up with orders.  This seemed to be common practice and the co-operation possibly extended as far as the ones who stayed behind in Catania, there is that famous photo of A.Di Mauro, Carmelo Catania and Vincenzo Jacobbaci all leaning on a 1938 Matford V8 outside the Pommery champagne house at Reims about 100 miles east of Paris which, if nothing else shows they all kept in touch sometime after 1938 and even travelled or met up. Ok, not so far from Paris but a long way from Sicily.  Another thought about that photo, there are no women present so it appears not to be a major social or family occasion, but a medium sized convertible coupe would not be the ideal for transporting or delivering guitars and parts either (unless they were the small accessories like bridges and tailpieces) so their meeting was not necessarily business either.

I read elsewhere that the Bucolos emigrated to Paris in the 1930s.  By 1948 Horace was working (one source had him listed as a foreman) at Busato. It seems Pierre also worked there in some capacity, but was he also a skilled luthier, or did he just get a job through his brother?  Later it seems he may have been just a retailer. By 1952 Busato was so busy running his business he no longer made any guitars, by then the top of the range Busatos were being made by Pierre Calza, and Pierre Fontaine claims to have made the bulk of the cheap ones, initially at Busato, then as a sub-contractor at his own workshop nearby in Champigny-sur-Marne.  So, Fontaine and the Bucolos certainly knew each other too.

The Pierre Fontaine interview in Vintage Vertigo quoted him as having made 250,000 guitars in his lifetime.  It is known he made a lot, or possibly all, of the cheaper Busatos in the second half of the ‘50s.  Busato had employed many people in the earlier years, but after opening his shop ‘Toute Pour La Musique’ as well as branding other instruments that were out-sourced (drums, accordions etc) it seems he scaled back on making guitars, certainly not making them himself, to concentrate on retail; thus Fontaine was sub-contracted to make the guitars. By the time Busato died in 1960 his registered businesses included haberdashery and lingerie (possibly an expansion for the two daughters in the family?).

Fontaine also made guitars for the Musikalia, Symphonia and Beuscher brands and possibly Sonora as some of these were often thought to be made by Busato.  Fontaine later scaled down his manufacturing for retailers like Paul Beuscher due, he said to the competition in the 1960s from cheap Japanese imports but he carried on making good quality Selmer type guitars individually until late in his career. These were retailed by Rome Instruments in Paris and are highly regarded by those who play them.

Of course the key statement that got my interest was that he said Pierre Bucolo was his “best customer”, and this from one as prolific as Fontaine must mean he made a LOT of Bucolo guitars.

If all of the above means it is possible my Bucolo was made by Fontaine then he must have made many different styles for different customers, the Busato-like Sonoras with their unbraced arched backs and 13th fret joint and possibly the Catania styled Bucolos too using hardware supplied by Catania.  The original tuners, now replaced as they were very stiff, (there were no other redundant screw holes underneath) could have been Italian too as they are not the yellow button Delaruelles that Fontaine usually fitted.

So yes, the evidence does suggest it may have come from Catania but it is a mystery whether that was from Carmelo Catania or Napoli, or possibly they worked together, or that Fontaine assembled them with parts from Sicily?

The best experts I have read are Francois Charle and Arnaud Legrand who wrote various reports for Vintage Vertigo as well as online at; https://www.guitaremag.com/article/busato/

Of course the investigations go on and I would love to hear from anyone with any knowledge of either Bucolo, Catania or Fontaine or any other connections.

AndyW

Great knowledge, Chris - I'm surprised at the Fontaine / Musikalia connection, who I think of as as very self-contained company, still existing & producing today. - I 'restored' an early 50's Musicalia (made early 1950s just before they changed spelling) gypsy guitar at the same time as the Bucolo.

We're agreed, I think, that many of the Catanian & Italian builders were small woodwork shops, buying pre-made tailpieces and tuners (and bridges, perhaps, maybe even necks) from the same source(s)- I can imagine itinerant seller(s) of instrument metal & wooden components, fret-wire etc. making the rounds of the workshops door-to-door.

I have a big collection of pictures of various "Sonora" branded GJ guitars, maybe one day I'll start a thread to try to sort out their different original manufacturers.

I need to do find more time to work on the Bucolo restoration video, & I'd like to feature the guitar in the soundtrack too, here's a wee picture of the edit-in-progress. Coming 'soon' to a screen near you...

-Andy-