JA>Anyway - the manager said they had to scrap it. I offered to
  >buy it AS IS - no warranty - etc. That was about 16 years
  >ago, so it held up for over a decade! :-)

That's not bad if you get it cheap enough..   B)

My Japanese Gibson copy I bought at a guitar store used when
I as looking for a guitar to leave at the cottage. The owner
said he had a trade-in he didn't want to sell but I could buy
it cheap if I wanted it. It seemed okay other than a sticker
it had on it near the bottom front, but he said if I gave him
$15 I could have it.

I did that, and when I got it home the first thing I did was
peel the sticker off of it and under it there was a hole..
I ended up cutting a wedge out of that area and gluing in
a piece of similar spruce to seal it up and stabilize the
sound (it was much improved). I couldn't match the patch to
the rest, so I painted it black and got a small brass plate
with my initials burned into the brass in black and it came
out pretty well, and it worked well for a lot of years before
I finally had to do more repairs as the original glue started
to fail, by then about 50 years old..

---
 * SLMR Rob  * Truth has one source but many wells
 * Origin: capitolcityonline.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/HTTP (618:250/1)