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…

Daves_guitars

So… I invited myself down to his workshop and we had a look at the situation…

This is what I had…

Mandolin July 2018.jpg

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.

Mandolin - new machine heads 1

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).

Holes plugged 1

 

OK folks. That’s enough excitement for now.  Tune in for the next instalment in a few days….