E-ROS Eros Dakota 1966 EKO Ranger Dreadnought vintage jumbo acoustic guitar

Vintage 1966 E-ROS Dakota  Jumbo dreadnaught guitar  

Made in Italy 

Very Similar guitar to an EKO Ranger (J54) 

The guitar has nice low action which is rare to find on these and also the glaze/varnish  usually come up  terrible on the top and back.  

 The soundboard is near perfect, there is a side  split/crack in the laminate/varnish which could easily be sealed, It's not in the actual wood and it's just so rare so find one of these with a nice flat soundboard  (no wood cracks) and with great action. set to 2.2mm at the 12th and the saddle screws lower or raise the action either side to which is a great future. 

It records  so much better  than my old EKO Ranger which set me back £300  this has a lot more bass and sounds less harsh. 

I play in open C and it sounds amazing, I recorded an instrumental track which I have added to you can hear how well I was able to play very fast finger patterns (without  strain) but also it will give you an idea of the tone as I didn't use much post production on the guitar, it was just recorded with a $100 AKG C1000S  and it sounds great  for folk style playing and more experimental patterns and tunings. 

I think this would suite a  more for a DADGAD  fingerpicker and fan of that style rather that a beginner banging out open chords as that would be a shame on a guitar that has a not of potencial to be more intricately played. 

condition wise, apart from  7"  side split (shown  in the laminate/glaze in pic 8 ) a  few little scratches here and there and  little nips but  all original and sounding bloody great and looking the part as well so they don't get much  better than this for an old 60s beast. 

Good enough for Jimmy Page to play and record with  is good enough for me. This same model  acoustic was used to record the rhythm track for "Thank You"  at Morgan Sound Studios in 1969.

More to follow... I don't really want to sell this guitar and i'm still writing a song with  her but I need the money and it's Xmas soon so I will just have to hope for the best pick up another  one further down the line as this is the guitar  I would always choose to record  fingerpicking with . 

USA/CAN shipping is by Parcelforce global priority and takes 5 working days from dispatch but give me a few days to pack this as I'm not firing this out the door in 24 hrs to get a fast shipping badge and would rather take more time & care with your guitar. 

There are surprisingly many E-Ros guitars around. They were made from 1966 to 1970 by a company of which very little is known other than it was called Fratelli Fuselli (Fuselli Brothers) and headquartered in Recanati.

As far as we know F.lli Fuselli has built mostly dreadnought sized flat top acoustic guitars. All have same dimensions with little variation in the appointments. They were available with six strings under the name 606 Dakota or 606 Arizona, with twelve strings as 612 Nevada or simply 612, some were factory fitted with an electromagnetic pickup and called 606-E or 612-E.

Half of them have a bolt-on neck and the other ones a set neck. Headstock is generally covered with a layer of black celluloid sporting a white E-Ros logo, though a minority have a natural mahogany headstock.

All are strikingly similar to the very first generation of the Eko Ranger series and more exactly to its forerunners J-54 and J-56 introduced in 1965: same five-piece neck construction, same rectangular neck attachment plate and generally only 20 frets (for its post-1967 Ranger VI and XII series Eko used a 3-piece neck construction with 21 frets as well as its distinctive trapeze neck plate).

From all that we cannot but conclude that the Eko company hired F.lli Fuselli as a contract manufacturer in 1965-1966 for its J-54 and J-56 series as well as for the initial runs of the Vox Country Western and Folk Twelve. For some reason F.lli Fuselli started in 1966 to sell guitars under their own E-Ros brand, a reason most probably related to the terrible fire that devastated most of the Eko factory the 11th of April 1966. Whether the Fuselli brothers wanted to take advantage of this sad opportunity to try their luck on the marketplace, or was it because Eko a few months later with its rebuild and enlarged facilities didn’t need anymore a partner like Fuselli, we cannot know.

E-Ros guitars are reasonably common in Europe (especially in the UK) but there is no evidence they ever made it on the U.S. market.

But now here’s the surprise: in the USA a number of folk guitars of obvious E-Ros origin were sold in the early 70’s with an Eko logo! I suppose that after the crisis that hit the European guitar industry as a whole in the late 60’s the Fuselli brothers stopped this operation and their luthiers joined Eko, bringing along the unsold inventory.

There is still in Recanati a company called Manifatture Fuselli & Co. SNC, established in 1970, that produces high quality  padded gigbags, cases and straps for guitars, accordions and portable keyboards.