I bought mine several years ago when they first started flooding ebay. Mine is Bruce Wei I believe. There was not much in the way of reviews at the time and none on the ground that I had come across. One showed up on a no reserve auction that had fallen through the cracks and I grabbed it for $60! The shipping cost another $80 and was the best packaging job I have ever seen. Spruce top and a rosewood box --super over blinged inlay and as I mentioned above pretty nicely done whether or not you like that sort of thing or not. That type of inlay work is done on a lot of stuff in Vietnam(like furniture) and other parts of Asia as well and so there seems to be a healthy labor supply of skilled inlay people. Tuning machines,strings, case all of very poor quality and forgivable given that it's something they would have to buy and one wouldn't expect a set of Waverly's on there. The materials(wood)on the instrument are very nice. Maybe the builder of DavidKOS's mandolin is better made,you would think that at least one of the builders would concentrate on the instrument quality rather than the presentation . I have thought all along that if these builders could ever really get their act together and produce a good reliable and consistently good sounding and playing mandolin we would all be buying them. The example given above by DavidKOS is someone having already imported these mandolins to the US and then reselling here. The price we are seeing might not really be a proper idea of what the price is from a direct sale-or rather semi direct sale---most of those Vietnamese instruments seem to be handled by Taiwanese middlemen. I am hoping now that I have a situation where I will be traveling to Thailand every few months that I can go to Vietnam and see where and how these instruments are produced. I have thought that someone would eventually go there and maybe make an investment to make a proper exportable good instrument-- like people are already doing with inlay work. It occurred to me that now that I am travelling to that part of the world that maybe that person could be me!
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