Just for fun a follow up:
new strings and some stretching and tuneing, retuning, etc and it sounds pretty dman good. once the strings started to get loose, it holds tune nicely, which was my biggest worry, and has that nice mellow warm nylon string tone I wanted for another flavor of guitar in the collection (this makes 6, all bargains or straight up cheap though).
The one hang up is a lack of projection, worse than i am used with with classical guitars. In my estimation the soundboard is a bit thick and probabaly doesn;t vobrate as nicely as it could. Probably has helped keep it together so well over the years. Nontheless, i am really happy for little more than the cost of new strings. It will make the perfect mellow-strum-around-the-campfire-guitar and sounds really nice fingerpicked.
Daav