Favilla Mandolins

[domradave]

Was wondering if anybody has or has seen a Favilla mandolin. I bought a guitar from Tom Favilla which I am very happy with. The Favilla mandolin compares well with the Martin mandolin. Favilla made flatbacks and roundbacks. I wish they were still in production. The Favilla Music store in Melville, Long Island, is now Murphy's Music.

[MikeEdgerton]

Favilla made several different types of mandolins over the years that the company was in business. In later years they seemed to shadow Martin models on guitars and they also made a very similar mandolin to the Martin style A.

One of their models appears to have been the seed for a few hundred brand named mandolins that were imported in the late 70's through the 90's. This 1955 Favilla bears a strong resemblance to these later not so hot mandolins.

[MikeEdgerton]

Now the Favilla mandolins I am most intrigued by is this one and the three others that have surfaced. When I wrote an e-mail to Big Tom many years he identified it as a model they had been building since the 20's. This is a Strad-O-Lin genre mandolin. Whoever built this built the Strad-O-Lins. In his next breath he told me they never built anything for any other company. I realize he is the last son of the family that participated in that business but from what I could see he started there in the mid-50's. Strad-O-Lins go back to the 30's possibly the 20's. I'd like to think he might have this one wrong. You can lay these Favilla branded Strad-O-Lin genre mandolins right on top of a comparable branded model and they are the same.

[MikeEdgerton]

In addition, this search thread shows every image of a Favilla mandolin of the cafe.

Also, this search thread will bring up every mention of Favilla on the Cafe.

[Jess L.]

Was wondering if anybody has or has seen a Favilla mandolin. ...

We have an old Favilla flatback mandolin here. Don't know its year of manufacture, but it has the colored crest (logo) on the headstock, which is supposed to be less common & might (maybe) help to pinpoint its age. Video of me playing it a year or so ago, although this doesn't present its best sound, due to structural issues & makeshift non-studio recording conditions:


(or direct link)

That mandolin is currently back in storage due to worries about a scary looking headstock crack. That crack has been there for decades but the instrument didn't have string tension on it during most of that time either. We temporarily hauled it out of storage last year so I could plunk around on it a little bit, I played it briefly with light gauge strings & tuned it down slightly lower than standard pitch to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic failure of that crack (that's the reason for the capo, to bring the instrument back up to GDAE), but I didn't like the way that crack was looking. So the string tension was removed again & it's back in storage.

The instrument has family value so we might get it fixed someday, but it would have to be done right or not at all. I won't allow the local part-time instrument-repair guy to use epoxy or Elmer's on it, that probably wouldn't hold anyway.

Anyhow, I liked playing it for that short time last year, & I too am kind of intrigued by Favilla instruments in general just based on the quality of this mandolin. It seems well-built (the crack likely was the result of some previous player dropping it or letting it fall over, surely no fault of the builders) & the instrument is kind of cute to look at.