I'm very excited. Puccini the Japanese mandolin is home. I picked it (him?) up today for $69 and backpacked it home, swaddled in a Harvard sweatshirt. Only the best for my antique wallhangers. The guy I picked it up from in the repair shop greeted me with, "Oh, YOU'RE the one... uh, do you actually play this thing?" Fortunately, his questions were not provoked by the state of Puccini so much as the discomfort of playing bowlbacks in general.
I barely looked at it in the shop, thinking I wouldn't be able to see what they had done, anyway. That turned out to be only partly true. The tuners, well, they could have just blown the dust off them and I wouldn't know. But they definitely did some substantial gluing on the back ribs and a good cleaning and oiling overall, leaving the mother of pearl fret dots shining like the moon and the face of it a little more golden. The back varnish is not even dandruffing as much as it was before. It looks funny to me with its shiny new strings, but it's back up to some kind of playability. I have no intention of ever getting it re-fretted (the frets do have substantial wear). It's not as if anyone's going to gig with it, for god's sake.
Awesome! Another instrument I can't play! :) Photos another day.
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