The only significant paint loss I can see is on the metal horn mouth, any easy fix. The varnish on the case looks original and should not be refinished.SPOONMAN19 wrote:Thanks Marco and Phono48 - I'm torn between this and the 112. Both are the same price - around 200$. But would lean towards whichever is rarer to come by. My fear is getting one of this and then slowly realizing that the repair / restoration job is prohibitively expensive. Especially if 114 parts that Phono48 mentioned are tough to come across. And I've never seen a colonial with that paint-job on the inside. Guessing somebody tried to "smarten" it up!Marco Gilardetti wrote:...on the other hand, this looks like the colonial version of the ultra-rare an much sought-after 114, so I would personally buy it even if it lacks some parts which could be easily replaced by scrapping another machine.
At $200 each I would buy every "Tropical" HMV I could lay my hands on. They were never catalogued in the UK, so the few that are here were brought home by officers of the British Raj at the end of their colonial service. If you decided not to keep them all, the ones you sold would probably show you a respectable profit which you could put towards restoring the others.
If the 114 was mine I would just thoroughly clean it and source the missing parts, shown here in close up :