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| 1960s Kapa Continental XII 12 string electric |
KAPA Guitars was founded in 1963 by a Dutch immigrant named Koob Veneman.
Mr. Veneman was the owner of Veneman's Music Emporium, a musical instrument store in Silver Spring Maryland.
During the early 1960’s Veneman made the decision to build his own unique line of guitars. This was the years of the British Invasion and the Guitar Boom and Mr. Veneman wanted his piece of the pie.
The necks, pickups and electronics originally came from German manufacturer Hofner. The guitars generally were equipped with two slider switches to control on/off function of the pickups, which is typical of Hofner's design of the 1960’s. In the company's later years they made their own pickups, which looked similar to Hofner units.
The tuners were made by Schaller. Kapa made his own bridges and tremolo assemblies. Most KAPA guitars are equipped with the tremolo.
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| CTS pots Image Credit: Mine  |
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| Authentic Hofner Staple Pickups Image Credit: Reverb - Victor's Shop |
Kapa vs Hofner pickups
Note the differences in the base plates and especially the mounting method. The Kapa pickups are hardly height adjustable due to the poor design of their base plate. I also doubt that they are true humbuckers as my pickups were quite noisy.
The Hofner pickups are humbuckers and I recently had to rewind one. Both coils were around 3.5-3.7k and the I rewound the dead coil with 3500 turns of 44AWG wire which came out a little hotter than I expected. I would probably put 3000 winds on next time.
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