gillymor wrote: Then there was the guy who broke into Bill Monroe's house and splintered his famous Gibson Lloyd Loar F-5. Judging from the before pictures it looked like it was totaled but Gibson put it back together and Monroe's first report indicated that it was almost all the way back.

Although the story I heard was that no other mandolin player could get good sound out of that Loar. It was built like a brick. In that case, breaking it actually let them fix some of the problems it had developed over the years. Monroe was not easy on mandolins!