[Chris Timson]

Here.

Chris

[Stephen Chambers]

But 5-fold bellows - on a metal-ended G/D...

[Daniel Hersh]

And the fact that Chris Algar was willing to sell it at that price makes think that the price was ok but not amazingly low. I also noticed that he recently sold a 48-button rosewood-ended Lachenal Crane Duet for GBP 750.00, which was a little more than half the price of the Jones. The Crane seemed like a good deal to me, but on the other hand I don't follow the Crane market and probably tend to think in terms of Anglo prices.

Stephen Chambers, on Jun 29 2009, 07:15 AM, said:

But 5-fold bellows - on a metal-ended G/D...

[Anglo-Irishman]

Daniel Hersh, on Jun 30 2009, 04:25 AM, said:

And the fact that Chris Algar was willing to sell it at that price makes think that the price was ok but not amazingly low. I also noticed that he recently sold a 48-button rosewood-ended Lachenal Crane Duet for GBP 750.00, which was a little more than half the price of the Jones. The Crane seemed like a good deal to me, but on the other hand I don't follow the Crane market and probably tend to think in terms of Anglo prices.

Daniel,
I also bought my Lachenal 48-b Crane from Chris Algar via Ebay auction. His starting price for that one was also GBP 750. It has metal buttons, so it's allegedly "better" than the one you cite, but in similar condition. Unfortunately, there was a second bidder that time, so the price went over the GBP 900 mark. So this bidder was lucky to be the only Crane aspirant with the ready cash at that moment in time. He got a bargain.

I had been enquiring with Chris for some time before the auction, and the offers he made for 48-b Cranes didn't go much above GBP 1000, some of them being lower.

The Crane market is completely different from the Anglo market. ITM is a craze at the moment, not least in the vast US market, and the makers of quality Anglos have long waiting lists, so good vintage instruments are in demand. People seem to pay almost as much for a used one as for a new one, the added value being that you can get it without a year-long wait.

With Cranes, the supply of vintage instruments seems to be just about equal to the demand, because there is no fashionable musical genre that dictates that you (and thousands of others) have to have a Crane!

Cheers,
John