ES-140D

[Danny Ray Barnes]

I have recently become a foster father of a beautiful little ES-140D. You may know that these are a 3/4 version of an ES-175, made for students or players with small hands. I'm trying to find out the year of manufacture. I know they were made from 1950 to 1957. This is not the ES-140T, which is the thin-line body version, it has the thick hollow body.

 

The only thing that looks like a serial number is inside the lower F-hole: the first character looks smeared or blotted out and is unreadable, then: 3233, then about 4 space after with a larger type size 9.

 

I've been to a few serial number sites, but have found notiing.

 

Can you help?

 

[Jayyj]

Should be a factory order number - a letter to denote the year, then a four digit batch number, then the place in the batch. Trouble is I can't for the life of me think what that letter is supposed to be.

 

I've always liked the look of this model but never had the chance to try one. I have a couple of Fenders with a similar scale (Duo Sonic and Musicmaster) and find them really enjoyable to play, although I find open tuning that pitches them a little higher than standard works best with them - they work great tuned mostly in fifths where the stretches aren't as big as on standard scale guitars.

[clayville]

The only thing I can add here (other than a long-standing desire to get one of these after playing one once years ago) comes from the book Gibson Electrics: The Classic Years by A.R. Duchossoir.

 

He says 2,385 of these shipped between 1950-57, usually between 260 and 350 per year and never more than 409 per year (in '53). There were only 30 of them made in a natural finish and those in 1956. The rest were sunburst.

 

I can't help with that smeared serial number. The author discusses the "A" (Artist) serial numbers used on "upper grade models" between 1947-61, and the use of white oval labels prior to 1955 and orange ones after... but that "upper grade" aspect and the smaller size here may mean that the "A" serial numbers and labels didn't apply to the ES-140s.

 

All I've got!

[Jayyj]

The code pictured will be a factory order number though - the smudged bit is the part that should tell you the year, starting from Z for 1952 then working backwards. Serial number if allocated would be on a label, but many lower grade models never had labels.