1937 National Style 97 Resonator Mandolin

February 06, 2023

1937 National Style 97 Resonator Mandolin

Fancy National mandolins don't show up very often. This Style 97 is the counterpart to a Style O guitar and it has all sorts of neat, sandblasted tropical scenes throughout its nickel-plated body. I love the sound of these mandolins once they're done-up but they can be real "thwackers" when they haven't seen service. Rocks-in-a-box tone, if you know what I mean...

This one needed a bunch of work to make it happy but it had already seen some "action" in the past -- a funky neck reset (with a pinned-in dowel, apparently), a funky headstock repair, replacement tuners, a bad refret job, and some wonky electronics under the hood. I've posted "process" shots of my work on it towards the end of this post if you want to see the work going into it.

Suffice to say, now that it's fixed-up and humming it's delicious. Compared to the Triolian-style mandolins I'm more used-to, this nickel-plated one is slightly rounder-sounding and less bluesy.

These have an almost-mandola scale length at 15" and so I always suggest down-tuning to F or E as standard G is quite a lot of tension and warps the neck over time -- or, with bigger gauges, you can get down to D or even mandola C, though the last one is a little floppy. I string these with 32w-9 GHS A240 strings standard and tune down a step to FCGD rather than GDAE as my "standard issue" these days. The same set will tune up to standard GDAE but it doesn't feel so nice on the hands and the instrument. It will also tune down to E just fine but I think 36w-10 sounds better for that. 40w-11 can get you DAEB and that sounds cool as heck for Celtic tunes, especially if you "drone it" in DADA.

Repairs included: neck reset, fret level/dress, interior fixings, new pickup install, cleaning, setup.

Body: metal, nickel-plated

Cone type: single

Bridge: biscuit, maple

Fretboard: ebony

Neck wood: maple

Action height at 12th fret: 1/16" overall (fast, spot-on)
String gauges: 32w-9 GHS A240 set, for FCGD tuning

Neck shape: medium C

Board radius: flat

Truss rod: non-adjustable

Neck relief: straight

Fret style: medium-wide

Scale length: 15"

Nut width: 1 1/4"

Body width: 12 3/4"

Body depth: 2 1/2"

Weight: 4 lbs 13 oz

Condition notes: as per the description above, it has plenty of old funk to it but the "bones" are good. It's mostly original. Funny alterations include giant replacement coverplate screws, a repaired tailpiece, the big old frets, and replacement tuners. At least the covers hide them, though!

Ready for some process shots?

Here's the cone when I opened it up. I thought the yellow knobs might be controls for a DeArmond magnetic pickup that was installed and then removed because they're the exact type used on some of those '60s DeArmond and Kent pods that come with external-mount pickups.

It turns out that -- yes, the controls were taken from one of those old "pods" but the pickup in this case is a speaker that's been turned into a microphone.

Needless to say, that's not very practical so I replaced it with a K&K acoustic pickup and reused a single volume pot instead.

Here's the dowel after I did some work. It had none of the original "islands" or "mushrooms" in there and the neck angle was bad. It had also been cut for that microphone in the middle. To reset the neck on this guy, I trimmed-down the dowel where it met the lip of the soundwell so I could knock the angle back.

Then I made a "fresh" island for the tailpiece end and used screws to keep them all in place. Tradition is to nail these in or just glue them but both of those options are not great when instruments get knocked-around in the real world.

This is looking-up towards the neck joint. Note the pine shim I've added between the dowel and the back of the instrument near the neck joint. This is glued in place with a bit of glue so it can be knocked-out if necessary. What it does is make the whole joint a lot more rigid so that the neck set doesn't tend to "drift" as it does without it.