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Old 10-17-2012, 08:32 AM
Zigeuner Zigeuner is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Northern California
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Quote:
Originally Posted by HHP View Post
Just a thought on conversions. While I don't think anyone is doing this to deceive, down the road somewhere someone else could well try and promote something like this as a vintage instrument. Might be nice if conversions had an additional label added to indicate they were modified and even better, if Martin would accept the information from converters and annotate their serial number records to indicate conversion. Probably not possible but it would be useful 20-30 years down the road.
No one with any knowledge of vintage Martins would be fooled by this as anything other than a rebuilt (converted) 1966 Martin guitar. It does appear to be very nice work, however and when an instrument gets to be in unplayable or bad condition, all the bets are off.

As to buying parts from C.F. Martin, that's a thing of the past unless you own a Martin repair station. They won't sell to us commoners anymore. I needed a fingerboard recently for my 1962 Martin D-28 that I'm refurbishing. I called Martin a couple of months ago, where I had bought parts for many years and was told that as of October 1, 2011, they no longer supply parts for us outsiders.

That fact, coupled with their recent cancellation of any neck reset work on Martin guitars more than 40 years old has left me on my own. I now buy parts from Stewart-Macdonald and Luthier's Mercantile International (LMI), both of which are great sources for Martin-like replacement parts. What's not to like?
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