The Airline Res-O-Glass: A Guitar Built Like a Boat

We get asked about the old Res-O-Glass guitars more than just about anything else. Folks email us photos of one they found at an estate sale, or one that's been in the family for fifty years, or one they're thinking about buying — and the questions are always some version of "What is this thing, why is it made of plastic, and why is it cracked?"

Fair questions. Here's the whole story...

First, the name game

Let's clear up who made what, because it trips up almost everybody.

The guitars themselves were built by Valco, a Chicago company whose name came from the initials of its three founders — Victor Smith, Al Frost, and Louis Dopyera (V.A.L. + Co.). Valco had roots going back to the National Dobro company, the folks behind those gorgeous metal-bodied resonator guitars. By the late 1950s and '60s, Valco was cranking out electric guitars under a handful of brand names: National was the premium line, Supro sat in the middle, and Airline was the budget-friendly badge.

So where does Montgomery Ward come in? Ward's was the big catalog and department-store chain, and "Airline" was their house brand — the same arrangement Sears had with its "Silvertone" label. Ward's didn't build guitars. They ordered them, slapped the Airline name on, and sold them through the catalog to anybody who wanted a real electric guitar without paying Gibson money. (Ward's actually sourced Airline-branded gear from a few different makers over the years — Harmony, Kay, Danelectro — but the fiberglass ones, the ones everybody clamors about today, came from Valco.)

The "Res-O-Glass" part

"Res-O-Glass" was simply Valco's trademarked name for fiberglass. And this is where it gets fun.

Think about what fiberglass meant in the early 1960s. It was the space-age wonder material. Corvette bodies were fiberglass. Boat hulls were fiberglass. Patio furniture, car fenders, you name it — if it was modern and a little futuristic, there was a good chance it was molded out of resin and glass fiber. Valco looked at all that and asked a question nobody else was really asking: why not a guitar?

Starting around 1961, Valco retooled part of their Chicago factory for fiberglass and began building bodies the exact same way a boatyard builds a hull. Each guitar body was molded in two halves — a top and a back, like a clamshell. Down the center they sandwiched a strip of wood (usually maple or poplar) that the neck bolted onto and that anchored the pickups and tailpiece. Then the two fiberglass shells were brought together and sealed along the seam with a rubber strip, held shut with screws running through the back.

That's not a metaphor. If you've ever taken the back off one of these and looked inside, the construction is dead ringer for a small fiberglass boat: two molded shells, a center spar for strength, sealed at the seam. Valco even pitched the material as an upgrade — more durable than wood, they said, and immune to swelling and shrinking with the weather. Cheaper to produce, too....back then!

Same catalog, same red.

Here's a fun one. Flip through an old Montgomery Ward catalog from this era and you'll find fiberglass boats sitting a few pages away from the guitars — some of them wearing the exact same red.

That's not as wild a coincidence as it sounds. Those early-'60s colors came straight out of the industrial paint world (the original Res-O-Glass green was literally named "Duco Seafoam," after DuPont's automotive paint line). Everybody molding fiberglass back then — boat builders, hot-rodders, guitar makers — was shopping the same shelf of resins, gelcoats, and pigments, and red was a runaway best-seller across all of it. So a Ward's fiberglass boat and an Airline guitar landing on the same red isn't really a surprise; they were almost certainly drawing from the same suppliers. Did Valco and the boat folks actually compare notes? We'll probably never know. But same catalog, same material, same red… makes you wonder, doesn't it? 

So why do they crack?

Here's the honest part, and it's the thing owners write to us about most.

Fiberglass from 1963 is not fiberglass from today. The resin Valco used gets brittle as it ages, and after sixty-some years a lot of these guitars develop cracks — typically along the seam where the two halves meet, around the screw holes and hardware where the material is stressed, and anywhere the guitar has taken a knock. The glossy outer layer can develop fine spider-web crazing the same way an old fiberglass boat or a vintage Corvette does. It's just what this material does with time.

Worth knowing too: these guitars had no truss rod. Instead the neck was held by a couple of bolts and a tilt adjuster. That's a separate headache from the cracking — necks can develop a hump, and the neck bolts can work loose over time — but it's part of the same story of an instrument built fast, cheap, and unconventional in an era when nobody was thinking about how it'd hold up in 2026.

None of this means a cracked Res-O-Glass is junk. Far from it. A lot of these cracks are cosmetic, plenty of them are stable, and the guitars are absolutely playable and gig-worthy. It's just the reality of owning a sixty-year-old plastic guitar, and it's smart to factor in when you're buying one; especially if that plastic is rattling around in a hardshell guitar case.

And yes — Jack White

We can't write about these without the obvious. When Jack White picked up a red two-pickup Airline for The White Stripes and put it front and center in the "Seven Nation Army" era, he turned a quirky, half-forgotten catalog guitar into a genuine icon practically overnight. He famously described it as a "hollow piece of plastic," which is both completely accurate and the best free advertising Valco never got to enjoy.

Before him, the same model was known as the "JB Hutto" — after the great Chicago slide bluesman who was the first name player to be regularly seen with one. Two very different players, one weird wonderful guitar.

A handsome sum

Jack White isn't the only name attached to these. Irish blues-rock legend Rory Gallagher played a 1965 red Res-O-Glas Airline — the very same J.B. Hutto model — which he picked up in London in the 1980s and used mainly for slide, well before the White Stripes era.

He's on film with it at the 1985 Montreux Jazz Festival. When Rory's Airline crossed the block at Bonhams, it sold for £19,200 — roughly $25,000. Not bad for a hollow piece of plastic. We told the whole story over here.

The short version

The Res-O-Glass guitars are a beautiful, oddball chapter of American guitar history: built by Valco in Chicago, sold by Montgomery Ward under the Airline name, and molded out of fiberglass using the same techniques as the boats and hot rods of the day. They crack, they have no truss rod, and they're still some of the coolest-looking, best-sounding instruments of their era.

That fiberglass heritage is exactly why the Airlines we build today are wood, with a proper truss rod — all the vintage style, none of the seam cracks. But the originals? There's nothing else like them, and there never will be. Hrmmm...

For more details on the Airline Guitars Jetsons '59 2P PRO Red - CLICK HERE

Got an old Res-O-Glass with a story — or a crack? Send us a photo. We never get tired of seeing these.