A Day in the Life
Well, winter is hopefully grinding to a halt and then spring will come, and boy will I be happy when it's here! At any rate, I thought I'd share with all of you a little bit of what "daily life" is like in the workshop. Here's an all-koa mandolin from the 1920s in glorious "home repair" condition. I love the drywall screws through the tailpiece... certainly helps the tone... not... and the end block is nicely broken away, too!
Top is thankfully solid and quite fine, save for some soundhole rosette separation (it's falling inwards) and the delightful unsettling of a number of frets.
Here I've sliced, sawed, and gone to town to finally remove that back. Finally I can start to get to work on it!
A lot of this kerfing will need regluing and I'll need to patch the top of the end block where those screws removed the top edge. This mandolin will be just fine when it's all put back together, and I can't wait to hear what an all-koa mando like this will sound like, but right now I'm cursing the fellow who came before me and hacksawed his or her way into the bowels of this mando...
And here's another interesting patient! I love, by the way, the use of glue and glitter to replace a missing MOP star... so... classy...
And here's a good reason why not just anyone should be allowed to install their own 5th string tuner... not only is the wood cracked and chipped at the hole that's been poorly drilled, they didn't bother to properly file the fretboard so when the peg was installed it raised the board, thus killing playability among other things... not to mention those lovely painted red "side dots" or the bizarre, gummy-glue substance they used to try and glue the fretboard down with.
Here's the dingy double-spun pot... and dingy hardware. After cleaning up the hardware, I found to my horror that those aren't typical rusty hooks... they're SILVER PAINTED rusty hooks. I can't stand it when someone paints banjo hardware -- call me a snob -- so I'm going to go ahead and drop them in some acetone -- and if they're too foul at the end -- replace them with parts-box hooks.
Egad! This poor banjo shows all the typical "poor home repair" issues that one could ever need to write a "how not to fix your banjo" guide. Here, rather than shimming the neck brace, a screw has been used to tighten the heel. NO, NO, NO! And NO!
Hardware again. And a nice inexplicable hole drilled above the end-bolt.
More dots. Did I mention the fretboard was refinished in a gloss finish?
Here's the heel... split a bit and repaired crudely, but at least thankfully solid-feeling.
And here's what fate demanded: dowel reset, fretboard removal and repair, and, as of the time I'm writing this, I've sanded all the wooden surfaces down smooth (mostly to remove all the crud and over-finishing of the prior "repair") and have already gotten a couple of coats of satin varnish on the 'jo. It's looking a lot healthier, too, with its dowel reset.
Comments
But yes, I can't wait to hear it too!