A Successful Failure

Last night I decided to give up on my reconstruction of a guitar-body tenor uke/octave mando/mandola that I've been working on for years. I owe a great debt of gratitude to many of you--too many to mention by name--and want to thank all who contributed.

I learned a lot from the experience. I want to share some thoughts. But lest I step over the TL:DR line, I put it in my blog, here: https://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/e...ferrerid=27672

I want to suggest that it might be particularly useful for those people who write in to say "Is it possible …?" or "Can I …?" Please feel free to post your thoughts.

Apparently it never occurred to me that I could just give up on projects like this. I seem to just stack them in the corner of my shop and try not to think about them. Thanks for the insight.

Definitely a successful failure. You learned a ton on doing it. My question is, though, is the attempt to take a particular tenor body and install an OM neck the failure or are you saying that an OM neck on a tenor uke body in general just does not work? It seems more the former to me.

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Originally Posted by MikeEdgerton

Apparently it never occurred to me that I could just give up on projects like this. I seem to just stack them in the corner of my shop and try not to think about them. Thanks for the insight.

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That's my strategy too, until I'm forced to do something else. Maybe the only reason I got to it was that right behind it is an acoustic bass guitar that I want to finish, so that I can build a couple of tenor guitars.

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Originally Posted by Jim Garber

Definitely a successful failure. You learned a ton on doing it. My question is, though, is the attempt to take a particular tenor body and install an OM neck the failure or are you saying that an OM neck on a tenor uke body in general just does not work? It seems more the former to me.

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I didn't exactly graft an OM neck on a tenor uke body, but I did change the tenor uke body to accomodate the additional stresses and the additional strings. The problem didn't have anything to do with anything Octave-manadolinish. The problem was the neck joint. It might not have failed on a Uke, I suppose. Or had my son not traveled with it to the hottest, most humid area of the world. But whatever the case, it not only failed but kept failing, right until I cut it out and completely reconstructed it. Unfortunately, by then all of the other parts of it were starting to be problematic.

It's too long a story to tell. But here's a metaphor from life. My favorite dog, Seamus the Airedale, died in the middle of playing ball with me. He just crumpled up mid-jump and died. I rushed him to the vet, though I knew Seamus was no more. The vet examined him, and I guess tried to revive him. But he couldn't. "I can't explain it, "he said. The dog is in perfect health." I was a little taken aback. I said: "You mean, in perfect health ... other than being DEAD."

Just like that instrument. The neck was great in the end, but ...

+1000 for letting it go rather than spending another 400 hours on it!

Don't forget the final step:

Ah, a specialist in pyroluthiery! :)