Solidbody 6 string emando

[Mastersound]

Hiya

Thought I'd share one of my recent creations with you all seeing as it's been a bit quiet in here...

I decided to make a couple of solidbody octave guitars. The first neck came out ok, but I was distracted by my phone ringing while I was cutting the headstock angle on the second one. No probs... I had plenty of scrap around the workshop so I glued in a filler piece. Of course I had to sand the filler piece to match the neck shape and made a mess of that, leaving a concave section. At that point I decided this neck would be for my own use and I'd make a 6 string neck fretted to 353mm mando scale length. I'd seen pics of Gibson's M6 and thought it might be fun to try something like that in an emando.

[Mastersound]

I had a pine body I'd cut to make a kind of ES335 shaped mando, but it was a bit too thin for this project so I decided to laminate some pieces of flooded gum to thicken the body and give it some interesting contrast between the timbers. I thought I'd left the piece clamped long enough (about 3 hours) and took the clamps off to use on another body I was working on. Of course next day when I went into the workshop the glue joint had opened and I had a major gap between pieces!

[Mastersound]

By now I'd definitely decided this would be one for me to keep as something to take to work and noodle on during breaks, so I put a GFS Tele Deluxe pickup into it, added a volume and tone control and a switch to select single coil or humbucker.

[Mastersound]

During a break between other projects I completed the neck, and eventually the whole thing came together. The action came up nicely and the intonation was a pleasure to adjust. Looking good... except of course the gap in the body and the filler piece in the neck! I picked the thing up and strummed a G chord. Nice. Then a D... bit cramped. Then an Am... how do I get my fat fingers into those shapes? The thing is sweet sounding but you'd have to have fingers like pencils to make chord shapes! The damn thing is impossible to play!

[Mastersound]

So there you have it my friends. The morals of this story are many....

1.) Next time I make a mistake on a neck I'm going to run the bandsaw through it so I won't be tempted to make something out of it.

2.) I've now learned to leave clamps on at least overnight, if not for a full 24 hours before releasing the pressure.

3.) 353mm is too short for a playable 6 string instrument for my fat fingers. I think 400mm is the minimum scale length for an octave guitar. Mandos are tuned in 5ths for a purpose it would appear! :-)

[thistle3585]

As always, looks good. Personally, I like the look of the neck repair. I did the same thing on a custom piece of furniture. The sawblade got into the corner on a piece of walnut, so I spliced in a small piece of curly maple. Everyone loved it, and a few thought it was intentional.
On the top crack, you can always clamp a board to it and run a router down the crack and glue in a contrasting strip.

What is the tuning? How did you handle the truss rod? I wondered if you felt like you needed any extra reinforcement in the neck.

[Mastersound]

Hi Andrew

It's tuned EADGBE up an octave with 10-46's. Trussrod is a piece of 1/2" square steel bar epoxied into a routed slot under the fretboard.