There have been a few "built threads" lately, and people seem to find them interesting, so I figured... what's one more?
I debated starting this because this will probably be a long term project (I'm busy with a lot of other things and the customer wants plenty of time to get the money together to pay the balance on completion, so it could be a year or more before it's done), and there could be considerable periods of time when there is no progress to report, but here goes anyway.
A friend (and great musician) has been talking about having a mandocello built for a couple of years, and he finally pulled the trigger and made his deposit, so work has begun. He particularly likes the look and sound of Mike Marshall's mandocello, so that was the jumping off point for designing this one. I decided to stick a little closer to the K4 than to Marshall's Monteleone, but I started drawing with a set of dimensions and little else. Points and scrolls and an oval hole were in the plan from the beginning, so after several days at the drawing table, and half a dozen modifications, I finally decided to consider the outline acceptable and start some actual wood work.
I had this red spruce top stashed away. It might have been big enough for an archtop guitar, but it had a large spike knot in it, so a portion of it was not useable. I found that I could slip the center joint a couple of inches and it would easily accommodate the outline of the 'cello, scroll and all.
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