I've been remiss!

I seem to have been a bit remiss with posting lately, so this one should make up for it!

Firstly, the octave electric mandolin is now complete and below are some photos for you; I must admit that I’m very pleased with the outcome.

Next; I forgot to show you the video of how I tackle the 8 tuner holes on a mandolin. If you use 4-on-a-plate tuners, you have to be extremely accurate with your drilling and here you’ll see the pains that I take. It’s worth mentioning that I use a StewMac drilling jig, but on the top/face side of the head. They recommend using it on the reverse side, the reason being that traditional F-style mandolins had tapered heads. Why? I don’t know, seems to make life even more problematic.

Also I’ve just made the fretboard and tailpiece for the archtop. If you look a few posts back you would have seen the bright colours that were exposed when the rosewood billet was first cut. As you can see it’s started to mellow a bit and is now tending towards an orange/brown instead of pink. I'm very pleased that I managed to get the tailpiece out of the same piece of wood, so that’ll match nicely. The tailpiece has had a good soaking of lemon oil hence the slight difference in colour and sheen.