I tore the Silvertone apart again and cut the shim down and put it back together. The action then would set up properly, with the bridge right where it should be, in what would be considered the middle of its adjustment range.
Basically I hot glued a little handle on the shim and shaved it on my belt sander. When I got done it was pretty thin, and I had to be very careful about taking off the glue.
This came out really well, and I got the neck angle I wanted. I was pretty lucky, because with no instruments large enough to measure the angles involved, I was just eyeballing.
Two of the slots in the nut were over cut and I did the trick with baking soda and crazy glue to build the nut back up. This guitar has a cheap plastic replacement nut, and it’s not quite skinny enough for the neck. I will have to measure it in order a real bone nut blank. Or six. I have a few guitars that want one.
The D string was too low at the bridge so I did the toothpick trick there. It was either that or cut the other five slots then raise the bridge. I wasn’t sure I was quite there yet. An acceptable replacement bridge is probably available but I hate to destroy this 60-year-old piece of rosewood.
Your 58 (Kay) Silverstone is fitted with three of the "speedbump" single coil pickups
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I’m pretty sure this was made by Kay for Sears, and with a different logo, for Spiegel.
Those pickups are heavy monsters. They definitely work better running through my little booster/limiter pedal.
It took me a few minutes to figure out the controls on this guitar. Each of the three pickups has its own volume knob. The selector switch allows you to select pickup one, pickup two, pickup three, or all three at once.
There is a bass knob and a treble knob, which cover output to the Jack, but one of them has a terrible buzz. I think its capacitor has gone dead.
Also there’s no ground wire to the tail piece but there’s something loose inside the guitar, perhaps a tiny nut that secured the ground wire to the tail piece by way of a flat head machine screw which also secured the strap button. That screw appears to be missing.
I have to get a pickup or two out again, when I put new strings on it, and start digging around inside some more. I am afraid that to remove one pot from this guitar to fix the capacitor I will actually have to remove other pots, and the jack, and their harness, and then fish it all back in at once.
So far all I have done is pull the knobs and lube those pot shafts from the outside.
If you look at the photograph above where I have the neck and the body separated, you will notice four extra holes. Three screws secure the neck of this guitar and one hole is for the factory jig when the neck was built.
But three of those holes were where some bozo put cabinet screws into this guitar, to try and achieve what I just did with a shim.
You can see I will have some plugging to fix this well and it will never be completely invisible.
To be sure, this is a cheaper steamed plywood guitar. No one carved the arched top and bottom.
Nonetheless that’s a beautiful piece of 70 year old maple veneer.
