New to the home is this gorgeous 1923 Gibson F4 mandolin.  The 1923 F4 is right there in the sweet spot of Lloyd Loar era Gibsons and feature, most notably, a truss-rod.  You can tell by the reduced size of the flowerpot inlay that they had to accommodate the truss cover.
In assessing this one, I looked at the headstock and something didn’t seem right. Â What looked like the faint outline of the truss cover and a filled in screw hole made no sense. Â Did they fill in the truss trough? Why is the headstock inlay right and the rest wrong. Â The answer as it came to me (later confirmed by a luthier) is that the neck had been replaced some time ago with a non-truss rod neck. Â And the headstock cover was pried off the previous neck and affixed to the replacement. Â Seems to me to be another Gibson neck underneath, but there is no way of telling for sure — if not then someone went through a LOT of trouble to make it look original. Â The fretboard is NOT period Gibson (or likely Gibson at all) as the dot markers are totally wrong.
When I got it, I repaired a small binding separation on the heel, and re-mounted the pick-guard in the correct place. Â There is a small screw-hole where the pickguard had been moved.
Even with the neck replacement, it is the body that counts — and it sounds as full and rich as any truss-rod F4.
SOLD!!!
