Complete!!

Here is the completed mandolin after ~8-9 coats of tru-oil, micromesh 6000-12000 and  buffing with Meguiar #2 polish. This is the first time I've ever used micromsh and I like it a lot, in spite of the high price. I then put a buffing foam disk (from StewMac) into my hand drill, put the hand drill in a vice and used it to polish the mandolin.

Here are some photos of the final instrument

Back to work on the finish

The water disaster in my previous (rented) house damaged tools, supplies, not to mention many personal items in the house. I have since relocated to central NJ and can finally get back to finishing the mandolin. My new goal is to complete this one by the end of the month or early Oct at the latest. There isn't much remaining.

I spent some time final-sanding the instrument - went up to 320 and spent (what I thought was) much time sanding. I found it convenient to use small hard (wood) and softer (closed cell stiff foam) blocks to hold the sanding paper. The hard block was useful on flat surfaces such as the head plate and the sides of the mandolin. The softer block conformed better to the curves of the instrument.

Next I used blue masking tape (painter's tape) to protect the entire fingerboard and as much of the binding as I could. Here is a a photo of the mandolin just before applying dye

I applied a thin coat of shellac (2-lb cut) to try and seal the wood somewhat and avoid "splotchiness". I knew I wanted to do it for the spruce top ,but ended up also using it on the rest of the maple body. I don't know if this was a good thing to do. It may prevent some of the figure (as little as exists in this kit) to pop but I did it anyway. I mixed my own shellac from flakes and dissolved them in denatured alcohol.

Dying the mandolin was a nerve-wrecking process - almost as much as the binding. Mistakes are very costly. Being a total beginner, all I could hope for was a reasonable finish job. I had practiced dying on some sample spruce and maple but still it's all very new to me and reading about it leaves a lot of unknowns , revealed only when you do the real thing with your hands.

I am using aniline dye powder (from LMII) mixed with denatured alcohol. I started with the amber and thought it was too brown for my taste. I wanted something a little more reddish and so I added small amounts of red to the mixed amber and kept on testing on wood until I got the shade I wanted. I think it was easier for me to get to this color starting with amber rather than starting with all primary colors. I mixed it well and let the dye solution sit overnight. Looking back, I think I should have strained the dye before using it because some aniline dye grains remained in the solution and eventually got on the wood. Next time.

There are some aspects to dye that I did not fully appreciate until now - must be obvious to anyone who has used dye before....

For example - the color on the wood gets darker and darker, with every swipe of the pad. In other words, it's not like paint where if you cover the surface with it, and then come back again, it will remain the same color. Here, the wood is never fully covered. You are distributing tiny dye particles suspended in alcohol. Therefore, every time you dip the pad in dye and bring it to the wood, you are adding color. On one hand this can be useful if you want darker and lighter areas. But it makes it hard to get even coloration across the instrument.

One good thing about this alcohol-based dye is that it does not raise the grain because the alcohol evaporates so fast.

The end result was a reasonably-even color over the maple and some splotchiness on the spruce, in spite of the shellac wash coat. I'm not sure what the reason is. Could be the wood. Could be that my sanding was not as good as could be. Could be that I worked the dye in for too long. However, I am not going to attempt to change it. It's time to complete the instrument and move on to the next project. I am happy with the color though.

Here are some photos of the mandolin right after dying. The tape is still on. The color is not exactly as it is in real life, due to the lighting and the camera in general but it gives the general idea.

I spent some time scraping the binding from any dye the seeped under the tape. I used an Exacto knife and worked slowly. One has to be very careful (from experience....) not to let the knife slip and scratch the instrument.... I think a simple tool can (should) be made with a blade extending out just a tiny bit to minimize the exposed edge. I'll put it on the list of things to improve in the future. Scratch repair is very difficult after the dye it on.

Today I put on two coats of Tru-Oil - my finish of choice for this mandolin. I wanted a simple and forgiving finish and I think Tru-Oil is it. My schedule is a coat in the morning and one at night when I come home from work. I use cheesecloth as a pad, rub a small amount on and wipe off any remaining oil. I want even thin coats. I plan to start rubbing the finish with 0000 steel wool after 4 coats and plan on about 10 coats total or when it looks "right".

Here are photos of the mandolin after 2 coats.

Finish will have to wait

Unfortunately I have not been able to live and work in the house for the past 3 weeks due to the water damage and ongoing (way too slow) construction to repair the place. I had to work hard to remove the rust from my parrot vise and plane that suffered damage and I need to re order all of my sandpaper. The entire stack was on the table when the ceiling collapsed under the weight of water and is not usable.

The good news though is that I AM MOVING! I just rented a house and will be relocating in June. AND that house has space for a small workshop. So things are looking up even if I have to put a stop on the mandolin work for a while

The good and the bad

The good news is that I made some more progress in my finish experiments. The bad news is that I cannot show the results....an unfortunate collapse of the ceiling above the work table, followed by steaming water gushing down obliterated the work...

However - we (the same famous "we" that the New Yorker magazine uses..) are to stay positive and so this is what I managed to do since the last posting:

Dye: I noticed that it was too hard to keep an even dye tone with my previous method. My idea of coming in and gently skimming the wood in one controlled motion (like an airplane landing and then taking off) turned out to be a poor one. It's just too hard to get good results. A better idea was to dilute the dye much more than I had. Then do the opposite of what I had originally said - namely, rub the dye into the wood continuously over and over until you get the desired coloration. I tried the method on the small remaining part of the wood sample and ended up with MUCH better results. That is good progress.

Finish: I applied about 6 coats of Tru-Oil diluted in mineral spirits. I think this works really well, even though I was not able to take it to a full polished finish. The thin coats go on easily with a rag and the lightest rubbing with 2000 grit paper knocked down any slight rough spots between coats. I like the richness of the finish as well. This is definitely what I will use on the mandolin.

When I started applying the Tru-Oil, I transferred some to a cotton pad and then applied it to the wood. That seemed very wasteful, as much of the oil remained in the pad. I wanted an easy method to transfer small amounts of oil to the wood before putting the pad down on it. I remembered that I had bought some pipets from stewmac and tried to use them to drop a little oil on the wood. It worked perfectly! These pipets are inexpensive and disposable, although they kept well between coat applications. I think I could end up using only one or two for the whole instrument.

I am going to set aside the finish experiments and move on to final sanding work

Playing with color

Spent some time this morning playing with dye colors and trying them out on some wood samples. I had gotten some guitar spruce top "rejects" to use as stain samples as well as some pieces of maple. I sanded them "through the grits" all the way up to 220 and then applied a wash coat of shellac to one piece each of maple and spruce. Sarah was most helpful in mixing colors. She has a very good sense for these types of things.

The dye is power from LMII, dissolved in denatured alcohol. The shellac-covered wood shows more defined figure and at the same time has less blotching than the bare wood. I will be applying finish to the stained woo, to see what the final effect is

In the meantime here is a photo from today's color session

in the white

Here is the mandolin "in the white". I still need to do final sanding and finish work on it, but otherwise it is functionally complete.


The tuners have been changed yet again. My first "upgrade" to Ping tuners did not yield all that much improvement. Not only did the Pings slip and and have to much play, but the edges of the string holes (in the posts) were actually sharp - sharp enough to cut and break more than one string!! I ended up ditching them and getting a set of Grover tuners from International Violin. They work perfectly and look very nice as well. I will have more close ups of the headstock and tuners once I complete the finish work

fitting the bridge

I had bought an ebony bridge to replace the one that came with the kit. A good tight fit of the bridge against the contour of the mandolin top is critical for extracting maximum sound. I used a piece of sandpaper on the top and ran the bridge across it to develop the right contour. In order to help the bridge stay upright during the sanding, and not lean over, I created a simple "wagon" jig as you can see in the photos. The bottom part of the bridge screws into the jig and then you have a much wider base to run along the top. Again - this was home made. Better jigs are available through StewMac but I had to slow down the acquisition of specialized tools, at least temporarily. There is also some degree of satisfaction in making your own tools, so I was not exactly heartbroken either. By the way, the black block in the back of the jig is a piece of closed-cell foam that I stole from my kayak outfitting materials. It cuts easily, stiff enough, and glues very well. It would have been better to have a small wheel there, but this was ok.

The photos show the jig but also show the beginning of the sanding, where it's quite clear that only a small part of the bridge is coming in contact with the top. The sanding is done when you can see a full mark on the sandpaper, or when your own mark on the bridge is sanded off.

setup

Once I took a close look at the frets, I realized that they were uneven in height. Using a few small straight pieces of aluminum, I was able to find the high frets. There were several of them along the neck. This needed to be corrected by sanding them flat and then crowning the tops and polishing them. For the sanding I used another sanding "stick" which I made out of a very flat angle aluminum. I cemented a piece of sandpaper onto it, as you can see below.



The flattening process was quick but it left the top of the frets quite scratched. Next time I think I'll use finer grit sandpaper even it it takes longer to flatten. To re-form the round tops of the frets I decided to use a simple triangular mill file. These are common and very inexpensive compared with the specialized crowning files on the market. However, I needed to modify the file so that the long edges would not harm the fretboard. To do that, I used the Dremel tool to grind the edges smooth. This made my tool into a safe-file as shown in the next photo.


I surrounded each fret with masking tape for the filing and then used the Dremel tool with a polishing wheel + compound to get the file scratches out as much as possible. This worked very well. I'm constatly finding new uses for the Dremel.



A big part of the setup was the making of the nut. My camera malfunctioned during that time so unfortunately I have no photos to show.

closing the box

I have fallen behind on updating the blog. It's time to catch up and document what has been achieved in recent months. In spite of me acting as the world's slowest builder (not by choice...) I am close to completing the mandolin. The mandolin was officially born on February 7th, 2009. To me, this means that on that date it became functionally complete, albeit without the finish. I will post a photo of it's current state in next posting. For now, let's go over what's been done since I've left off

First, let me address my neck angle worries which I stressed over in the last posting. Although I suspect the angle is not ideal, I was able to get decent string action by cutting down the bottom of the bridge saddle to facilitate lowing it. Problem solved = major sigh of relief!

Going back in time - gluing in the lining was fairly straight forward. The kit came in with a solid thin strip for lining, rather then the more common kerf lining. I needed a lot of small clamps, and ended up using everything I had, including wooden clothes line clips with a rubber band reinforcement for extra clamping power. It worked just fine. No need to always buy specialized tools!



Once the glue dried, I continued to flatten the entire edge of the ribs/lining area so that the back plate would sit flush on it without rocking. I feared that clamping the back onto a non-flat area would induce twist in the body. In order to flatten the edge, I created a long sanding stick by taking a flat piece of wood and gluing sandpaper to it with some pray adhesive. This sanding stick method is very useful for various operations.



The big moment of closing the box came next. I approaches the task with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. The back plate was within may be 1mm of the width of the body, so aligning it for gluing was crucial. The glue would make the join slippery and every clamp would pull the back a little this or that way. The solution was a locator pin, pre-installed on the tail block. At least one end wouldbe anchored in place. I could not use a locator pin in in the neck block because , again, the precision needed in alignment. So this was a good enough compromise. I used a...wooden toothpick as the pin and drilled a hole for it in the tail block. Once it was glued in, I cut it short and put a little black marker ink on it to transfer the location to the top plate. I then drilled a shallow hole in the top plate and made sure I had a snug and perfect fit. By the way, the photo below also shows another problem with this kit. The ribs (which came pre-glued to the block) were done....less then perectly...and a visible gap is evident. Luckily most of it would be hidden behind the tailpiece. Same for the gap in the binding. No worries.


Gluing the back on took some fast and careful alignment, before the glue had a chance to set. It's really true what they say - you can never have too many clamps! I used them all - cam clamps. small F clamps, a dozen violin spool clamps. Wherever extra protection was needed, I used some leather scraps to avoid denting the wood. I love this shot. So....industrial.