Come Together

I’ve reached that point with the mandolin where all those bits that I have been working on individually – the neck, the sides, the soundboard and back – all get put together and a real instrument takes shape. Great to see all this happen, but the road to a playable instrument certainly still has it’s hazards!

Finishing off the soundboard and back all went pretty smoothly. I’m really happy with the soundboard, actually pleasantly surprised I haven’t had to make another trip down the valley for another set of wood.

Starting to look musical

Cutting and shaping the f-holes made a big difference in the top, and this brought out another choice that mandolin makers either do or don’t do: I chose not to surround these holes with a mesh to strengthen the holes. Might make the points a little more fragile, but I don’t expect to go all Hendrix on this thing and I can’t see how adding glue and some mesh is going to clarify the acoustics at all.

Just before the top goes on I ad some of the binding trim, a few straight pieces of padauk to cover the joints between the pieces of the sides.

A little padauk to clean up the seams, ready for the top

I use a frightening abomination of a dremel tool with a hacked wooden block to act as a guide so I don’t gouge into the wood. It’s still a walking-on-thin-ice dance to manually get to the right depth, as even at high speeds and thin cuts, the maple is begging to grab onto that bit.

With that done, the top goes on, with a whole whack of clamps.

No mandolins were harmed in the making of this photo

Cutting the rabbet grooves around the top for that binding is an even more frightening experience, and I resort to carving knives and sanding drums on the drill press to cut down on the risk. The top’s on, the binding around the top is installed, and I even install the tailpiece to see what this thing is gonna look like.

Getting there...

Next step after the top is attaching the neck to the body. I’ve got an extension to support the bottom piece of the fretboard, and it’s a bit of work to shave that down and contour the soundboard underneath so they won’t interfere with one another while I’m playing, and I apply some of the finish to both those spots, as there’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to get in between those two pieces once they are glued together.

Just before the neck is attached to the body

It’s a simple v-groove to align the two pieces, and lots of fiddling to be sure that when it goes together, it will align with the rest of the instrument. To strengthen things after, I drill and press in a couple of dowels between the neck and body block. Simpler than a dovetail joint, I’m hoping that for this instrument and the ~180 pounds of tension on the strings, it’ll be good enough.

For me, the most intimidating step in this process so far has been installing the back on the instrument. I’ve got sound bars on the bottom of the fretboard, and everything is sanded down nice and clean in there. I decided to go for it and install a pickup in the mandolin as well, though there’s a chance this thing will never see a stage setting (Winney says “History favours the bold”). As the back is glued up and ready to go, though, there’s a moment’s hesitation: more than at any other point so far, there’s no (easy) turning back at this point. I glue that back on (after the labels have been installed so you can see them through the f-holes, of course), and if I need to do anything else inside, it’s either endoscopic surgery or massive destruction to get in there.

A last look at the inside of the mandolin

Most of the pieces are now in place. The back is on, Owen and I have even test-strung it with just a few strings. I really like the sustain in what I have heard, and I find I’ve still got a bunch of work to do to lower the action at both ends. I’m in the process of installing the binding around the back as I type, then there’s some finish sanding to do all around. A bunch of effort to apply a french polish to the instrument (it’ll end up being a very thin, fragile finish, unlike many mandolins I’ve seen that look like they’ve been dipped into a thick pot of varathane), and my guess is that I’ll string the whole thing up before I start the finishing process, to see how she really sounds.

Almost there...

Stay tuned!

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