German archtop mandolinetto

[Martin Jonas]

I've talked here (http://www.mandolincafe.net/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=13;t=46546) about my new mandolinetto from Ebay Germany, and here are some pictures.

First off, this is the full frontal. That badge on the headstock says "Musikhaus Gromann, Villingen - Schwarzwald" (Black Forest). The fret markers are the same beige colour and probably the same material as the fretboard binding and the pickguard, probably bakelite. There was never any marker on the 10th fret. Solid aluminium tuner buttons. Brass saddle on a fixed ebony bridge.

Martin

[Martin Jonas]

Second picture: here is the nice steel trapeze tailpiece, the f-holes and the bridge. All nicely-made, but with just enough rough edges to make me think "handmade" rather than from the Hoyer or Framus factory. That tailpiece clearly wants ball-end strings, but somebody has threaded loopend Thomastiks through.

This picture also clearly shows the crack next to the tailblock. It's much less prominent in real life; the flash has caught on the edges and had highlighted them.

Martin

[Martin Jonas]

The back: two-piece solid maple, some figure but no book-matching. Nice neck joint, which doesn't look to have moved.

Martin

[Martin Jonas]

This picture tells most of the story: there's a lot of arch in the top and back, and some up-and-down between fretboard and bridge. The neck has a bit of a bow resulting in a high action. I need to consider what to do about that. At the moment I'm thinking of shimming the fretboard to compensate for the neck bow without having to cut down the bridge.

Martin

[Martin Jonas]

Final one for now. The fingerboard is raised above the soundboard. Unusually, the pickguard is attached with a bakelite bracket, not a metal one. In addition it is held in place with pins into the fretboard and into the bridge.

Martin

[jasona]

Very interesting creature. How does it sound? I can't believe those loop end string survive being strung to pitch like that.

[Martin Jonas]

Rather surprisingly, the strings seem to have survived just fine despite clearly having been at pitch for years. All the the tension is on the two sharp bends around the edges of the tailpiece, the loops themselves aren't tensioned. It's a credit to the toughness of Thomastik strings, I think.

Difficult to assess sound, as the action is currently too high to play and I've taken the tension off to spare the neck. Just from plucking a few notes, it sounds remarkably like the sort of tone David Rawlings gets from his battered 1930s Epiphone. Unlike any other mandolin I've ever heard, but then I've never played another postwar German mandolinetto, of which there are quite a few.

Martin

[Martin Jonas]

The neck has a bit of a bow resulting in a high action. #I need to consider what to do about that. #At the moment I'm thinking of shimming the fretboard to compensate for the neck bow without having to cut down the bridge.
Progress report: I have now managed to deal with the neck bow and the high action, by shimming the fretboard.

First, I took off the fretboard by heating it with a clothes iron and gently separating it from the neck. #First time I did this, and it worked just fine. #The only problem was that the material used for the 12th fret marker and the fretboard binding expanded when heated, and then slightly melted where it touched the iron. #Sanding/polishing it at the end of the job resolved that.

Then, I added the shim and clamped/reglued the fingerboard. #Rather than laboriously fitting a solid piece of wood to the bowed neck wood and then shaping its other surface to the required neck relief (no truss rod!), I decided on a much quicker, if somewhat dirty, method: I built up a wedge-shaped shim out of four layers of ebony veneer, rated at 0.6mm thickness. #This way, I could fit #the veneer layers oversized, hanging over the side of the fretboard, and just shifting them around until the fretbaord clamped over it had the right height and neck relief. #Then, I glued the veneer layers and the fretboard in one go. #After the end of the clamping period, the overhanging veneer could just be trimmed off with a sharp knife.

It all worked surprisingly well: after gluing, I did indeed have exactly the neck relief I wanted, and I also had plenty of fretboard height. #Slightly more than I needed for the original bridge, actually, probably because the veneer was slightly thicker than its rating, but as I was planning to replace the original bridge with a standard adjustable archtop bridge anyway, that's not a big issue.

A couple of photos to illustrate: first off, here is the mandolin with the fretboard removed.

Martin

[Martin Jonas]

Second photo: good neck relief with the shim in place. In this photo, one can still see the individual layers of veneer making up the shim. There's still a cosmetic job to do to blend in the appearance of the shim with the rest of the neck. I'm planning to smooth out the side of the neck by filling in the gap between the veneer layers with a rosewood dust/glue mixture, then sanding it smooth and staining black.

Martin

[delsbrother]

Hey, I like that - instead of a neck re-set, it's a neck build-up!

[Fliss]

Looking good, Martin, I'm glad to hear the fretboard came off as easily as you hoped. I actually think your method of building up the shim is more elegant than using a solid piece, and must be easier.

Fliss

[Martin Jonas]

It certainly is fast: total time was about two hours, which included 45 minutes clamping time to bond (using Titebond rather than hide glue) and the final cleanup of excess glue etc. I think a neck reset takes rather longer.

Martin

[Martin Jonas]

A bit of an update on this one: After correcting the neck curvature, I fitted a standard adjustable mandolin bridge (after all, that's what archtop guitars have, too) and strung it up as a mandolin. Two things became apparent quite quickly:

1) The neck needed further strengthening as it was bowing again within a week. So, I took the fretboard off again (much easier than the first time -- Titebond Original is your friend!), routed a channel into the neck and inserted a rectangular 2-by-5mm steel bar. Then levelled the neck again, tidied up some coarse bits from my first attempt and glued the fretboard back on. It's been rock solid ever since and the bar is so light that the balance of the instrument is barely changed.

2) It's not a mandolin at all, it's a mandola! The high E was weak and didn't sustain well, but the instrument is much more successful when strung as a mandola with fairly substantial gauges on the low C (0.056"). Really nice tone, much like a scaled-down archtop jazz guitar (not much of a surprise, really), which makes it rather unusual for a mandola. Good sustain, good intonation, good playability.

Here are a couple of photos, and I'll try to record a short clip to demonstrate the tone.

Martin

[Martin Jonas]

Here is the new side view, with the added shim and the straightened neck.

Martin

[homeslice]

That's awesome! Im looking foward to your sound clip....great job. http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

[jk245]

Does anyone know if there are any companies who presently manufacture instruments in a size like these older mandolinetto? It looks like a great instrument for travel.

[Bill Snyder]

All of the guitar shaped mandolins currently being built that I can think of are not any smaller than a common a or f-style mandolin. I'm thinking that Martin's is no smaller than a more common a or f-style mandolin either. Of course his has a 15 inch scale.
If size is an issue for you for travel there is always the Martin Backpacker mandolin.

[Bob DeVellis]

One of the selling points that Howe-Orme used in promoting its mandolins was that they could fit in a standard suitcase for travel. So, the idea of these "mandolinetto" type instruments as travel mandolins goes back more than a century.

[Martin Jonas]

Bill is right: mine is a fairly similar size to a Gibson A, and it's quite a bit deeper-bodied. I posted the photo below a littel while ago in the groupings thread. It shows the mandolinetto next to my 1922 A-jr.

http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/uploads/post-15-79490-groups.jpg

Howe-Orme mandolinettos, on the other hand, were quite a bit smaller-bodied, so that's a different story.

Martin

[JEStanek]

If you can't find another cool one like Martin's you could try the Draleon Royal by Century Strings for a Guitar Shaped Mandolin. Here's Ted's (Mandohack) #review. (http://jazzmando.com/draleon_royale.shtml) #It's more of a gypsy oval mando than an F hole variety. #I believe they are in the ballpark of $1.5K

Jamie

EDIT: Martin, you did some good work on that one of yours. It looks great.

[Martin Jonas]

I've finally got around to recording a brief clip. I can't really play mandola (as opposed to mandolin), and I'm still trying to figure out what pick and playing style best suits this one, so this is just a simple mandolin tune (Death Valley Waltz) transposed a fifth down. Probably neither the genre nor the tune to show the mandola off to its full potential, but it gives an idea of what it sounds like.

Link (http://www.martin.jonas.dsl.pipex.com/Death_Valley_Waltz_mandola.mp3)

I've also played around a bit with a few swing tunes (Sleepy Lagoon, Begin The Beguine and Summertime) and they sound pretty promising, but I'm not happy with the recordings I made of those -- I really need somebody to back me, or arrange them as chord melodies.

Martin

[delsbrother]

The late David Hodson's Djangolins were mandolin-scale but very small-bodied. Cozy in its custom case, it rocks as a travel mando.

[homeslice]

Sounds great! It actually sounds like what I would have expected, which was unexpected...if that makes sense. Im sure you're gonna have a lot of fun with this.

[flatback8]

Interesting - I hadn't seen any of these before!

I've recently bought a Hoyer. It had been a bit massacred by the original owner (I bought it in a “garage” car-boot sale). A luthier friend took it as far as he could, but it would need a TOTAL rebuild to be frettable; so I’m using it for slide now. Sounds great, almost resonatory in sound.

I’ve just got to decide my tunings and pick the right gauge strings. Luckily I can use ball-end guitar strings (though it looks a bit messy)

[markishandsome]

but it would need a TOTAL rebuild to be frettable


Looks fine from here, what exactly is the problem?

[Martin Jonas]

Interesting Hoyer. Also confirms my view that although mine is similar in some respects, it is not an actual Hoyer. What's the scale length on the Hoyer?

I also wonder what is wrong with your Hoyer to make it unfrettable. Mine was unfrettable when I got it, but with my neck buildup and the steel rod inserted into the neck it's now pretty good. If it's a question of a bent neck, the same method may work on yours. It wasn't really all that much work, and would have been even faster if I had got it right the first time. About two hours for the initial neck buildup, and about the same for taking the fretboard off again, planing, inserting the steel rod and glueing the fretboard back.

Martin

[flatback8]

The zero-fret had been sawn off: my luthier-friend has inserted a piece of ebony but the fret-positioning isn't greatly accurate anyway - added to that it's a non-compensating bridge, and it needs a refret. It really needs a new fingerboard and re-positioned tuners (the strings bind on each other)

I bought it cheap, and to bring it up to a professional standard it would need spending about five or six times what I paid for it!

I'll just keep it for slide! (unless I win the National Lottery ha ha!)

-- Martin; just read your post - yes, it needs that total rebuild, but I don't have the time or the equipment, and to hire a professional to do it, it would be out of my budget!

[Fliss]

I've also played around a bit with a few swing tunes (Sleepy Lagoon, Begin The Beguine and Summertime) and they sound pretty promising, but I'm not happy with the recordings I made of those -- I really need somebody to back me, or arrange them as chord melodies.

Martin
Martin, I'm a bit behind on this thread but just spotted this about the recordings. If you like, I could have a go at doing a guitar backing for you, let me know if you want to get together to have a go at that.

Fliss