I'm an amateur luthier and have a lot of work into this. Story is I found it for $60 and was really excited, because I wanted a Kentucky (I can't afford a high dollar mando). So I get it home and try to adjust it to play nice, but it really couldn't be adjusted all that much. The fretboard had a ski jump where the neck meets the body and it just couldn't be set up correctly. So, I pulled all the frets, sanded the fretboard true and refretted. Made a new bone nut to replace the plastic and put a new ebony bridge on it.
I sooo believe that luthiers earn their money. The amount of tweaking on the nut slots alone was a lot of work but I didn't want to go too deep and have to repair a slot. These new strings have been detuned and retuned a lot. The bridge was fit to the top and I still had a take a small amount off the top of the bridge base to get the saddle to go down low enough. If anything, the action could be raised a little bit, but it plays good now all the way to the last fret with no buzzes! The refret went OK. Next time I'll have better nippers for the tang. The frets required some leveling of course, and I only have a cheap crowning tool. Next time hopefully a better tool for that.
I believe this is a 2010 model since the serial # starts with 10. What I know about it is the truss rod is conventional single action, not the dual action that you see on a lot of modern instruments. The body is all solid bookmatched woods, but not carved. Still, it's better than some budget mandos out there. It has a nice ringing tone and I like it.
I had a flatback Gibson A-00 for a while and also a Loar something or other, but they are sold.
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