First Staining Coat

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

The long weekend presented an opportunity to get some work done, so I went ahead and did some initial stain work.

Since my last post, I have spent a number of hours sanding and sanding. I gotta say, its amazing how much sanding there is to do. You would think that for an instrument that is so small that this wouldn’t be such a large time consumer, but it really is. Every time you get done with one area, another presents itself. Then, once you finished with that, its time to drop to a finer grit and do it all over again. But, even so, the results are worth it. I really love the way the wood feels when finally sanded to a 600 grit – very smooth.

While pictures really don’t do it justice, IMHO, here are some shots “in the white”.







So before I got to staining, I decided to go back to review a video I had seen about how to create a sunburst stain effect on a mandolin. I had found THIS VIDEO from Fine Woodworking by James Condino once before and decided I would try to use his techniques.

To begin, I started on the back and, using the Charcoal Brown dye, began by rubbing this in to enhance the “quilted” effect of the maple. Here are some before, during, and after shots.

This is really just another shot of “in-the-white” for comparison.

Here I have rubbed the back down with water, as Mr. Condino suggests, to prevent too much dye from getting in too deeply to work with.

Here I have rubbed in the stain across the entire surface of the wood (in hindsight, I believe I put down too much, but I don’t think it ended up creating an issue – I will use less and thinner on my next mando).

And, finally, here is how it looked after sanding off the majority of stain. Its kind of hard to see the difference in this photo, but when I hold it up and move it around, there appears to be more “depth” to the wood now.

Similar to the back, I chose to do the same to both the sides, neck, and the peghead (I went lighter on the neck since I want it to be almost white in the long run). Here is how they looked.


With these two, you can get an idea how this will look when it’s finished. I’m pretty psyched.


And once again, the pictures don’t really tell the tale – the “depth” is pretty cool.





I’m really going to be interested in how the back of the peghead comes out. After sanding off the stain, it has some of the quilted effect, but not like the body and sides (it is a veneer, if you recall). If I don’t like it, I figure I can always stain it really dark – the tuners will just stand out more that way.

Well that’s about it for now. I still plan to try my hand with the sunburst on the one remaining spare soundboard I have before I commit to the mandolin, so hopefully I can show you that next time.

Finished Binding and Trimming the Bridge

Sunday, August 30, 2009

I haven’t spent a lot of time on this project for the last few weeks - spending more time with family and work instead - so I have also been lax in updating this blog. But I have made some progress.

I strung up the mandolin and fully tuned it and, much to my pleasant surprise, the top did not collapse or even make any cracking noises, for that matter (as you may recall, I was worried about this since I managed to make my soundboard way too thin at the base and had to reinforce it). But while there was good news about the soundboard, there was also not-so-good news elsewhere; the action (distance from the strings to the fretboard) was WAY too high. Looking at it (sorry - no photos) you would have thought I hadn’t even tried to get it right. That was pretty disappointing. But I figured out how to handle it (I hope).

The bridge that I bought is made of two halves; the lower half that makes contact with the soundboard and the upper half that the strings rest upon. The two halves are then held together (and spaced apart in an adjustable fashion) by two thumbscrews. By cutting down the thickness of each of these two halves, I brought the action down to what I believe will be a workable distance.

In this photo, you can see the mark on the upper half of the bridge where I then trimmed to - a lot of material to take off, I know! Similarly, I took off about half that much material from the lower piece. After trimming, I held a long straight edge between the nut and the bridge assembly and I think the height is just about right. I will have to wait until I string it up again to see for sure. I also have yet to shape the base of the bridge to the soundboard. That will reduce the height a even more.

Aside from the bridge work, I also managed to finish gluing on the remainder of my binding and then trim it to height and width. The final pieces were on the peghead and this is how it looks now.


I still have to do some fill-in work around the binding similar to what I did with the inlay and then a bunch of sanding, but I think it came out alright for my first attempt. Next time I intend to do several things differently (shape and bind the peghead veneer before gluing them in place, for starters) so that one should look much better.

With those completed, it has become time to get my finished sanding done in preparation for staining. I haven’t yet stained my second trial soundboard but after the results I got on my first trial, you can bet I will do the second before committing the mandolin itself to this.