Official Luthiers Forum!

This is a prototype we built for a local musician, Tony O'Neill.

His current mando is a Gilchrist and he didn't want to take it on a tour of Europe once he found out how much the insurance was going to be. So he asked us to build him a mando that looked like an archtop jazz guitar but with F-holes similar to a Rickenbacher.

He's not strictly a bluegrass player but also plays some Celtic music so he was after an instrument with plenty of sustain, particularly in the lower strings.

It was delivered today and he was very happy with his first impressions of it.
He's got three gigs on over the weekend so I'll get some feedback early next week.

In a couple of months we'll try and take some of the better aspects of this one and refine them.

It sounds surprisingly like an F-model mando. Most of the measurements were taken from my Ray Black mando (Ray is based here in Geelong) which is an F.

It's a Sitka top, Blackwood back and sides, Mahogany neck, Cumberland Acoustics Bridge and a Randy Allen tailpiece with a K & K pickup installed.

Thanks for looking

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Bob Connor
Geelong, Australia

Very cool Bob -

Rick Jones (who lives a few miles from here and will likely be at the meeting in september) made a pair of mandos modeled on a miniature F-5 a few months back. Seems to be a new trend forming here.

It looks great.

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Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation.

Lovely, Bob! I want one!



A miniature F5, really? I have a feeling you meant L5 (although I have seen some "piccolo" F5's that were really cute; as if binding a regular sized one wasn't tough enough...). I think Michael Lewis among others has been making these for a long time.

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Rian Gitar og Mandolin

deleted, double post

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Rian Gitar og Mandolin

Bob,

Wow - a Django Mini-Me

That looks fabulous. When are you going to do a full sized archtop guitar?

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Dave White
De Faoite Stringed Instruments
". . . the one thing a machine just can't do is give you character and personalities and sometimes that comes with flaws, but it always comes with humanity" Monty Don talking about hand weaving, "Mastercrafts", Weaving, BBC March 2010

That is really cool. I dig it.

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Mike

"The Dude abides. I don't know about you but I take comfort in that. It's good knowin' he's out there. The Dude. Takin' 'er easy for all us sinners. Shoosh." The Stranger

Nice!

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Howard Klepper
http://www.klepperguitars.com

When all else fails, clean the shop.

Beautiful work, Bob!

Thanks everyone.

It was certainly a lot of fun to build.

So much so that I started another one today. (and I want one for myself)

Cheers

Bob

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Bob Connor
Geelong, Australia