I got into a hypothetical discussion yesterday about whether a small shop builder could take a better than average Asian import F5, undo the plate to re-plane the thickness, recut the tone bars, and do whatever else, to turn it into something as good sounding as the mandolins on which they sign their own name. It's made me curious if any builder here has actually done this operation on, for example, something on the level of a Kentucky 1000 or an Eastman 850. The perfect reply would also include a recording of before and after, as well as some idea of how many hours it took to do the job.
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