Re: New guy looking for advice on travel with mandolin
It sounds like I was probably flying bigger metal than what you're on, but I carried a mandolin as a wrench on the DC-10, then worked the front seats on the baby 'Bus, DC-9, MadDog, and finally retiring off the A321. I carried a super-cheap eBay-special Rover in a cheap case, and the only damage it received is when I walked into a door while holding it during a layover. The Rover was cheap, sounded cheap, and could never be tuned right. I couldn't stand it. In 2008, I finally decided to buy a bottom end Kentucky, but the guy at the Homestead Picking Parlor knew me, and let me try a Kentucky KM-505. Sold! I bought it, and a Boulder padded gig bag and schlepped that mando around till I retired this fall. Up to four legs a day, multiple tail changes, vans, buses, trains, cabs, you name it. Sat reserve, LOTS of deadheads where the mando had no problem going in the overhead of a mainline jet straight in, headstock first. On RJs, if there wasn't room in the overhead, every single flight attendant let me put it in the coat closet up front when I asked nicely. The Airbus was great, had a closet in the cockpit, mandolin lived there; one day the jump-seater also had a KM-505. In the MadDog (MD-88), there was NO room for storage, so the mandolin lived behind my seat, upside down, standing on the headstock all day long. I never, ever got any damage to the mandolin. No cracks, no warps, no snapped strings, shifted bridges, no broken this, that, or the other. It probably wasn't fond of going from Cancun to Calgary one New Years Eve, but it played fine and I made a lot of neat jams and sessions with it. If you're riding other folks planes a lot, I'd ditch the hardshell case for better stowage options. Oh, the Boulder bag had shoulder straps. I took one off, and would flip the bag upside down, stick the neck through the shafts of my roller-bag handles, let the strap support the weight, and off we went to the next plane. I did sew a little extra padding onto the gig bag over where neck rubbed against the roller bag, but it took me years to getting around to that, and there was never any damage I could see.
Rob Ross
Apple Valley, Minne-SOH-tah
1996 Flatiron A5-Performer, 1915 Gibson F-2 (loaned to me by a friend), 2008 Kentucky Master KM-505 A-Model
1925 Bacon Peerless tenor banjo (Irish tuning), 1985 Lloyd Laplant F-5, 2021 Ibanez PFT2 Tenor Guitar (GDAE)
and of course, the 1970 Suzuki-Violin-Sha Bowl Back Taterbug
Bookmarks