Talk of Fakes (or Antiqued newer Basses) came up......

[Martin Sheridan]

Absolutely no need for an apology. I was clearly wrong. As someone said, there's a reason why erasures are put on pencils.

What did this have to do with basses? You started a very good topic on the eastern European fakes now on the market and then one thing let to another. I get a little bent sometimes when things get off topic and this time I think I'm the one who was responsible. But I think we were talking about the difficult task of identification which led to f-hole placement which led to how the Italians themselves lost the how and why they did things.

I forgot to mention on the f hole placement issue that Sacconi said he didn't think that Stradivari's sons even understood why the old man put them where he did because he was no sooner dead than they started moving them around. I prefer to think that they had been ordered around by the old man for so long that they just wanted to try out some of their own ideas. I can just hear him saying, "put the f holes there because I said too, no ands ifs or buts!"