Lockdown Mandolin...

[Fretworn]

I dream of having a mandola one day. I just feel the range would better suit any music I would use it for.

[JimC]

Slow progress... The carbon reinforcement for the neck and centreblock done. While I think potentially laminated in place carbon is a better solution than prefabricated rods, I can't recommend it. Getting decent consolidation of the layup was far harder than I hoped, and I have a good bit of experience with the material.

The black stripe is carbon, it runs down the neck and then is spread out across the centre block, so the strands of carbon run from the headstock right through to the tail block.

I've kinda fallen in love with wood rasps. Its never been a tool in my armoury, I've always used things with blades, but as the wood rasp seems to be the tool of choice for neck shaping I bought those couple of cheap Chinese ones . No doubt they'll get blunt before too long, especially when I get onto the rosewood finger board, but I can well understand why people are willing to pay 70quid plus for top quality ones.

[JimC]

Progressing slowly... The neck is provisionally shaped, the back of the body is glued on now, and I have been agonising over details for the front. I also have to decide on electrics soon. Its a tiny body, not much room to install later, but I could easily spend 5 times the total expenditure so far on pickups. The tuners hurt enough! I'm also looking at getting a pro to cut the fret slots, which will also hurt.

[jugglindan]

Looks great so far. Definitely way beyond my ability!

I know what you mean about cost blow outs though. I built a pedal once and doubled my parts cost just because I wanted fancy knobs.

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[Simon Barden]

ust because I wanted fancy knobs.

Don't we all?

[jugglindan]

Don't we all?

Yes, yes we do.

[JimC]

Speaking of knobs, I thought it would be cool to have a thumb wheel type volume control in the side of the instrument, but then I investigated the practicalities and changed my mind!

[JimC]

Current state of affairs. The body is glued together. I'm waiting for the fretboard to come back - I outsourced the job of cutting the slots having low confidence in both my skills and my available tools.

The bridge shown is a first pass, its (I hope) about 5mm too high. Doing the intonation will be hard work with nothing adjustable other than by moving the bridge back and forward and sanding it lower.

The tailpiece is also an experiment, Mandolin tailpieces mostly come in three varieties, thin pressed steel plate ugly and kitsch, but cheap, pressed steel plate, complicated, still rather kitsch and worryingly expensive or finally sophisticated cast design, viciously expensive and rather large lumps.

What I'm thinking about are four stainless steel pins (dinghy rigging pins actually) which will go through this little rosewood block and into the tail piece below. It will need some kind of surround though to protect hand from string ends, but I'm still working on that.



I wish I had some of you guys skills in finishing though, it would be nice to have some kind of sunburst, but I'm not at all confident. Also most spruce top finishes I've seen have tended to veer towards the antique violin look, which I'm less taken by.

[JimC]

Little roadblock on the journey. I gave a quick wipe with white spirit, and the sapele neck and meranti (at a guess) back and sides look truly horrible together. Like it or not it looks as if I'm going to have to learn to do wood staining - and brush up on my 40 years unused colour matching skills...

[JimC]

Well, that was a roller coaster...
I was talking about a need to dye the sides. I decided I'd also try a sort of burst with the dyes I had. Result, on spruce, highly unsatisfactory and blotchy.

I now hear that it's considered good practice to put a coat of shellac down on spruce before dye...

And so my first idea was to try what putting a fake binding border would look like, so out with the dry wipe marker.

Really not much better.

At this stage I was about to order a piece of wood for a new top. However I thought I'd try and remedy before pressing 'the button' so out with my favourite boat building tool the random orbital sander.

So with a lot of scraping round the neck and fine paper I got to here. The top is now on the thin side, but I don't think [hope?] riskily so. Wasn't brave enough to try another dye job - nor enough wood to get one wrong...