So, where are we up to?

So, where are we up to? Nadim’s guitar is going through the French polishing process and it’s starting to look very pretty!

With the constructional work on Nadim’s completed, I’m back to working on John’s mandolin- the neck has gone on this week. The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that John’s Standard isn’t quite standard as it has an “optional extra” in the way of a herringbone rosette.

I’ve also just completed the external mould for Adrian’s octave mandolin and you can see its shape/size in comparison to my mandolin mould. We decided that his tenor mandola would be built to the same shape as my standard mandolin. My mandolins are quite big, so using the same shape for the mandola seems a sensible thing to do. However, the body will be about 15mm deeper and the sound hole a bit larger which will lower the natural resonance of the body.

 In order to keep the two instruments matching, both sets of sides and the head overlays have come from the same set of guitar sides.

The sides have just been bent and will dry out, clamped in their respective moulds.

As far as the ornamentation is concerned Adrian wants clean lines, so both instruments are being built to a similar spec as the Standard mandolin, but with the upgrade of my handmade tail pieces. You can see the soundboards with their bound sound holes below.