OT: Is it a thing in UK to buy musical instruments at auctions? If so, how do I get into it?

There are lots on sites such as Ebay and Gumtree such as

Ask Mr Google. They seem to be mostly normal auction houses that do specialist sales a few times a year. You might also try normal musical instrument dealers, who may well take used instruments in part exchange and then need to sell them if possible.

Very odd, I saw this email while I'm listening to an Alison Brown track. I'm not really a great fan of the banjo, but she is rather good.

Auction houses tend to outsource their online bidding to platforms like:

Some houses expect you to collect from them on the day or in the week after the auction, while others will ship.

Don't expect prices to be better priced than ebay though (the auction often adds fees and VAT on top), and with ebay you get better consumer rights.

Instruments don't travel well which tends to depress the prices, so you might be lucky and find something local or within travelling distance, either on ebay or at auction.

Theo

A quick look on ebay showed a fair number on offer from UK addresses.

As well as the suggestions above, if you are willing to wear out some shoe leather on a semi-regular basis you may well find what you want (eventually) on a market stall, in a junk shop or at the kind of auction used for house clearances and the like.

We have two regular bric-a-brac markets in my town every week (same market place but one session on Tuesdays and one on Saturdays) plus two auction houses dealing in house clearances with sales once a fortnight and two great emporiums of junk which are worth sifting through and which are open all week. They don't always come in twos like this - in fact if you were to widen the net a little wider than just my town you'd find quite a lot more of each in easy reach.

It's not just a northern thing: when I lived further south I could still find places where the odd unexpected instrument would turn up without a horrendous price tag.

Nick

Hobgoblin sell second hand instruments - worth giving them a call.

Tenor Banjos are used for Irish music so join a few suitable groups (Facebook, Reddit, thesession, etcetera) and ask around.

Several years ago I had a Chinese Tenor that wasn't too bad. TBH banjos are so simple there's not much to go wrong. Check the intonation (that the frets are positioned correctly), the action (height at 12th fret), that the neck is straight and that the drum will hold tension. I doubt that it would be difficult to convert a 5-string to a Tenor - a good DIY (apologies if that's becoming a swear word here) project.

In article <10enmid$2l5jf$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, Ottavio Caruso <ottavio2006- snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com scribeth thus

Is nothing on this site what you'd think good enough?..