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I'd use USPS Express Mail (overnight) service unless it was just such an inexpensive instrument that the cost (probably around 50 bucks) isn't justified. Especially during mid-winter or mid-summer...

No but you can break them surprisingly easily.

I don't think there are many KM-1000's selling for $2,400 or anywhere close to that. Even though it's a very nice mandolin.

But the guy picking one up for $500 did get an extremely good deal...if...

I could have sworn there were accounts on this forum a year or two ago about people having import or export trouble due to shell (abalone?) ornamentation on a guitar. Or maybe it was on the Martin...

At least a decal does not require CITES documentation.

Look at it this way. Which stings more...being shot down by someone you don't even know or giving your wife the pleasure of shooting you down herself?

There's a long way between "not losing as much money" and "making money". If you buy a mandolin for $600 and sell it for $400 you've done about as well as most anyone is likely to do. If you just...

Doug,

I'm still a relative newbie to mandolin (coming up on two years) but I think I've learned one thing about the pick noise...

It's going to take more than the right pick. Doggone...

I adore the way they feel but have the pick-noise problem. Just something about my stroke and maybe the way they're beveled or whatever. I can get a similar tone without the pick noise from a Wegen...

I own two kinds of instruments. Those I play regularly and those I sell and get rid of. No desire for having unplayed instruments cluttering up my life and tying up money. At one point I owned three...

Dave,

I think that probably happens every day. I suspect it's a drop in the bucket compared to all the people who have bought mandolins in a local music store over the years that are...

$382.27 shipped. That's about what they seem to go for, mid-upper 300's. Not the deal of a lifetime, it went for about what it's worth. The Trinity College instruments in that family are $500 or a...

It's going to get well over $350 by the time it's done. Still 3+ hours to go and it is over $300 already. If anybody pays more than $400 for it they're an eBay auction addict...

Dodging calls from debt collectors is a very quirky definition of "fun".

Define "OK"...my saddle is the original one Mike Black put on when he built the mandolin. Compensated for plain A strings but I have Thomastik-Infeld flatwounds with a wound A and the intonation is...

I would never take money from a normal household obligation (like car, rent, food, clothing, health care) to buy an extra musical instrument.

That's is a perfectly all right but nothing...

So that's what "string dampening means"! And here I thought it was a typo in the topic title...

There's surprisingly little excess travel available on those thumbwheels, once you take into account the difference between someone like me who want the action "as low as it will go" and some other...

On-board speakers in a tiny little device are seldom going to sound very musical. I think the ones in an iPhone do an amazingly good job for their size but still the sound quality only rises to...

John 'splained it more ably than I did but I'll blather on one more bit...

Whatever the merits of "a $25,000 mandolin" vs. "a $2,500 mandolin" neither of them would exist were there not potential...

For my part, Kyle at The Mando Shop was very helpful with my presale inquiries about an Eastman MD504. The price was fair, he shipped it out two days after I placed the order and it arrived in good...

Well, he asked if you needed to jump up to $1,500+ to do a lot better than an LM-400 or similar Eastman for around $500. And some of us answered that in our opinion the answer was yes. A really...

Yeah, when I first started mandolin lessons I showed the teacher a couple different picks and said I found the "Dawg" style pretty easy to play. My teacher's comment was "Might be easy to play but...

I like the medium Elixir on my Eastman oval-hole MD504. As J.T.W. says the D'Addario EXP are a good substitute and I in particular find the EXP77 sort of match the extra brightness that Elixirs tend...

To my mind, there's no really desirable mandolins in between the MD5xx Eastman, LM-400 "The Loar" and KM-5xx Kentucky at around $500-ish and the Collings MT at a bit over $2,000. If you happen to...