It’s all about planning

I’m fitting a Headway transducer to Brendan’s new mandolin and this changes the order of the way that I put things together. I have to start work on the tailpiece much sooner than I usually do.

Then the soundboard is fitted and glued to the rim (normally I glue the back first) and the area around the end graft is cleaned up.

 

Then the brass base of the tailpiece is fitted to the rim, I only use two screws as the jacket socket is essentially a 12 mm bolt holding the tailpiece in place.

With everything very, very secure the 12mm hole is drilled through the tail block, using the tailpiece as guide.

Also at this stage (i.e. before the back goes on) the jack socket can be test fitted and the backing nut adjusted to the correct position.

Once I take the socket out of the hole, I glue the nut in position with some CA- this greatly helps when fitting the pick-up finally in place, as you have to work blind through the relatively small sound hole.

Fitting the Headway transducer II

A couple of posts back, you saw some of the preparation that I do whilst making an instrument that has a transducer built in to it. Here’s the next instalment……

This week, all of the construction was completed on Rob’s Standard mandolin. Before I apply any finish, I like to get the mandolin playing and set-up i.e action and intonation spot-on, this in turn gives the final location of the bridge.

 Low tack masking tape records the bridge’s position. You may wonder why this craftsman leaves the ends of his tape so tatty looking? Smooth it down and you run the risk of your finger nails digging into the soundboard as you struggle to remove the tape!

All of this is painstaking, as you have to drill a hole through the soundboard exactly where the transducer exits the underside of the bridge. I always get Amanda to sight the drill for me; it must be perpendicular.

Then after a period of fiddling around, the transducer gets pulled through its hole; remember all of this is done blind.

Eventually the bridge goes back into its position, the strings back to tension and the transducer tested.

Fitting a Headway mandolin transducer

This week I completed the installation of the Headway transducer into a Breedlove mandolin. Here’s the pre-amp; you can judge its size compared to the tailpiece. 

 The real tricky part of installing a pick-up like this is that everything is fitted from the inside and it’s virtually impossible to work through such a small sound hole. I find that a piece gardening wire is very helpful for pulling components through.

After, who knows how many frustrating attempts, you can’t belief how satisfying it is to poke a wire through a hole!!

Here you can see how it’s routed through the new bridge.

 And the finished job- who’d know that anything had been done? There’s no doubt that these Headways produce a very good amplified sound and they are my pick-ups of choice.