greetings and crazy questions

[mandolinbill]

Hello to all. I'm new here and I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Bill and I play guitar and mandolin. I consider myself to be an average woodworker. Recently, I had the idea of building a mandola for my own use. I cant aford to buy one at the moment so I figured that I try to build one myself. Being that I do alot of lathe work as a hobby as well, I tend to harvest my own lumber. I've got a load of Black Walnut laying around so I thought that I'd use that for the neck and sides and back. I also have Rock Maple and a bit of Ash.White and Red Oak and various boards from Home Depot.All of this material will be planed and jointed by hand. But I cant figure out what I could use for the fingerboard and the sound board. I live in Northeast Pa ,so does anyone have a sugestion to what I could use for the soundboard and fingerboard? What could be a good substite for ebony or sitka spruce? Also, this may sound crazy but I have an idea that I'd like to hear opinions about. One of the ways I produce usable material from log is by spliting. Sometimes I use a chain saw, it depends on the situation. What I was thinking to get bookmatched pieces for the sound board was to cut the log appropriatly ( I dont know how to describe it but if you can answer this, then you'd probably know what I'm talking about http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif ) From that I'd cut that piece in half where I'd have two pieces about and inch strong thick.Jointer plane the edges and glue the two together. That would produce a crude looking slab of lumber but that would be planed down to the properthickness. At least the grain would be correct. Or would it? It's just and idea I had.What do ya think...how far off am I? http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/laugh.gif

[WoodyMcKenzie]

Bill--

I would first at least get a set of plans or maybe a book or two and try to figure out if you need to buy any special tools. Is it gonna be a flat topped mandola? There is a book out there by a fellow named Troughton that might be helpful. It has plans for mandolin/mandola/octave mandolins.

You can make the back/sides/neck out of maple or walnut. Try to find some spruce for the top. Does red spruce grow in that part of the country? I went to a local lumber store and found a nice board of quarter sawn western red cedar and made a mandolin top out of it.

It's possible that you could make the fingerboard out of rock maple. It's not that expensive to buy a preslotted fingerboard from somewhere like this:

http://www.lmii.com/Default.asp

Look under the "Services" link.

If you are lucky, it's possible to find a piece of wood that is wide enough to make a mandola back from one piece, without bookmatching and joining. That might make your life easier.

In general, building is a tedious and time consuming process that requires a lot of patience and attention to detail. I think most people #aren't very satisfied with their first efforts and many people spend a lot more money on tools than they thought they would. But if you love to carve wood and you are good at it, it can be very satisfying!

Woody

[sunburst]

Splitting, as it turns out, is the best way to prepair top wood, and to some extent back wood to avoid runout.
Besides spruce and cedar, sometimes you can find usable quartered Douglas Fir in the lumber store to use for a top.

If you are a turner, you might know a source for Persimon wood. It could be used for a fingerboard if you don't want to use Ebony or Rosewood. It's diospyros, the same genus as ebony, and sometimes dark to nearly black. In fact, if you can find it let me know.

You might try doing some searches for older threads here and find a lot of the info your looking for.