Thanks to you all I found the neck stamp inside. October 1998. My wife when I put it on the stand looked at my Taylor and said, that one looks like it came off an assembly line. Still love my Taylor but this D55 is gorgeous
Welcome aboard, Jklemm! Yep, Guild was small enough to put a lot more "hand-built" care into their guitars, especially a flagship model like the D55.
I first realized it even in my entry-level D25. For the first couple of months I used to just "eyeball" it, getting familiar with the details..all the body and neck and fretboard joins smooth and seamless...sighting along the edge of the neck showed all the fret-ends perfectly aligned at a consistent angle, beveled perfectly and no sharp edges either...and inside, nary an unsightly glue squeeze-out from any of the braces or kerfing where the top and back join the sides.
And one realizes, "Man, when they take
that much care even where you don't even see it,
that's true pride in craftsmanship".
D55 history:
It was derived from one of Guild's first 2 dreadnought flattops, the rosewood bodied D50.
Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers, an act that had some popularity in the early-mid '60's, special-ordered D50's with the fancy necks Guild used on their jumbo body F50 flagship model, and those guitars were labeled "D50 Special".
By 1968 the Smothers Brothers even had their own TV show and Tommy used one of those, a
lot.
Apparently the increased visibility of the guitar led to increased demand which led Guild to give it a formal model number and name, the "Television D55", but still special-order only until 1974.
OK, how did they do things in Westerly when your guitar was built? Thanks to our forum host GAD there's an archive of Guild Gallery Magazines from '97-'98 which feature a series of articles on "Building a D55".
Links here:
Pt 1:
https://www.gad.net/Blog/2010/07/26/guild-gallery-catalog-1997-1998/
Pt 2:
https://www.gad.net/Blog/2010/07/27/guild-gallery-catalog-1998/#gallery-9
At this point I feel it's only fair to warn you that all too often, a person's first Guild is not their last.
Hope ya like
the forum!
