To tone bar or not?

[drjlove]

Hello All-

I'm pretty new to the Cafe and new also newbie at building instruments. I've done a couple of mountain dulcimers and a ukulele with reasonable success. I've started building a Saga A mandolin kit from International Violin. Things have been progressing along fine so far.

I am at the point where the instructions call for the addition of the tone bars. I have them fitted to the underside of the top using sandpaper taped to the surface and sanding until the tone bars fit the contour. Before glueing them in I wanted to get the advice of experienced builders on whether or not the tone bars are necessary or not.

I've read some discussion on Cafe forums (not builders section) about certain models of mandolins that do not have tone bars i.e. (The Loar LM-400 for one). Some have stated that the absence of these are one of the reasons that these particular instruments have such a good and balanced sound. (I realize the subjectivity of this claim.)

Being a newbie to all of this, I'm wondering what would be the result if I left them out of my kit. Would the instrument suffer from poor stability? Would the sound be impacted one way or another? Essentially, should I put them in or not?

Cheers,

Joe in St. Louis

[Tavy]

I know nothing about the kit, but I would stick with what the kit was designed to have in the first place. My expectation is that mandos with no tone bars have the arching and graduations designed specifically for that.

[sunburst]

If the top is thick and stiff enough to withstand bridge pressure (for a couple hundred years) without them, you could build it without tone bars. What would the difference in sound be? Don't know. I've never built a caved top f-hole mandolin without them so I don't know how the sound would differ from my "usual" sound, and I certainly can't have any idea what your kit would sound like either way.
Unless you just want to experiment (with no baseline to experiment from, this being your first mandolin) for the sake of it, and really want to, go ahead and leave them out, but I'd suggest sticking to standard construction in this early learning phase.

[drjlove]

Thank you both for the replies... I'm was leaning toward sticking with what the instructions recommend. I wanted to see what some seasoned builders thoughts were on this. I think this kind of seals it for me that I will go ahead with glueing in the tone bars as prescribed.

BTW: Both of you guys do stunning work (from your web site links.) VERY impressive. Kudos!

Regards,

Joe