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. What looked like the faint outline of the truss cover and a filled in screw hole made no sense. Did they fill in the truss trough? Why is the headstock inlay right and the rest wrong. 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. And the headstock cover was pried off the previous neck and affixed to the replacement. 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. 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. 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!!!
