Well… it’s been a bit of a time since I last looked at the mandolin. To start with life intervened, and then there were so many little problems I didn’t know how to solve I rather lost confidence in the ability to do it. Solution? Ask Dave Mattey!
Dave has been making guitars, mandolins, citterns etc for several years now. Here is a photo I took in January 2018. Note the instruments on the sofa, and the acoustic guitars to the right…
So… I invited myself down to his workshop and we had a look at the situation…
This is what I had…
It didn’t look so bad when it was all laid out. There were three main stumbling blocks. Firstly I didn’t know how to apply new finish (more of that later). Secondly the fingerboard had always been a bit erratic. My friend Dave Cammish gave me a new pre-cut mandolin fingerboard, so maybe we could use that. Thirdly the original machine heads were very low quality. I bought some more (Grovers) which looked the right size, but they were slightly out, as you can see in this next picture. Trying to insert them they starting splaying out and wouldn’t fit.
Anyway, encourage by Dave’s optimism we started! The first thing to do was fill up the holes for the machine heads with mahogany plugs, and re-drill them to the correct spacing for the new machine heads. No sooner said than done! What would take me a month we did in thirty minutes! (When I say ‘we’ it was mostly Dave – I thought I’d better leave it to the expert).
OK folks. That’s enough excitement for now. Tune in for the next instalment in a few days….
DavidC said:
Mike,
Great to see the new instalment. One would hope that if the spacings on the Grovers are close to the originals that with the ferrules in place the modification will be invisible.
I don’t know what you’re intending in terms of finish but
https://www.manchesterguitartech.co.uk
provides very nice quality nitrocellulose lacquers. They’re not cheap but they are very good and spray very well. I’ve been using the satin and matte finishes on a number of repairs with superb results, most recently on a Martin neck repair and on Oscar Schmidt autoharp that was damaged in transit (the owner couldn’t find where the repair was!).
Looking forward to the next instalment,
David
cambridgeriffs said:
That looks a good site! Have you tried the sanding sealers he sells?