I've been thinking of getting an OM for a while now, and I've also been keeping an eye out for a well-preserved guitar or mandolin by Joseph Bohmann. Sometimes, everything just comes together:
It has many of the wacky features that Bohmann is famous for: double tailpiece, his patented tuners, and metal rods inside the body intended to give sympathetic vibration. I'd read that these rods had minimal effect, if any, and that's definitely true. Their mute system still works, and I can't discern a difference in sound either way. The mandolin has a pleasant tone and reasonably nice volume; the G strings sound a little thinner than the rest, but I find this problem on a lot of larger mandolin-family creations. Remarkably, the tuners are about as smooth as most new ones.
As this is my first OM, I'm still adapting to the neck. Fast tenor guitar-style chords is out; the neck is just too chunky. However, picking individual notes is a breeze on the wide, radiused fretboard. The intonation isn't perfect, but I've heard worse.
There is a big "PAT APLD. FOR" scrawled across the neck block. Assuming this refers to the design patent for the arched top and sympathetic rods, that narrows down the date of construction to between October 1911 and February 1915 - the dates the patent was filed and awarded.
Here's a quick sound clip:
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