1960s Homebrew Danelectro-Land Lefty Electric Mandocello

So -- this mess, huh? It appears to be a homemade pine body with a Danelectro Convertible neck added to it. The best part of the original job was the putty they fit into the neck pocket to shore-up a bad cut...

It's another Mike Brown find, of course! When it arrived it had a scissor-cut aluminum "pickguard" with all sorts of sharp edges, the Dano lipstick pickup and original wiring harness somehow fit to it, and the body cut was like a poor imitation of a Teisco Sharkfin. 

Mike had me make it into a real instrument. Oof!

This included recutting the body's upper bout, fitting a new control plate and wiring harness, more mods to the already-modded Dano tailpiece, a new bridge (old wire-style Teisco one), new pickguard to hide all of the old mess (sort-of Harmony or Kay influenced and translucent -- note that a Strat pickup route template can be moved over to "extend" to a "big lipstick" size), fitting of new neck bolts and an old Japanese neckplate, and then, of course -- setup work.

Mike actually sat in with us some weeks back and both fit the new (vintage) tuners to the headstock and leveled/dressed the frets himself. I did have to go a bit banzai on the original aluminum nut to get it ground-down enough to accept new string paths, though.

The end result is a highly-playable, lovely-sounding mandocello. Mike tunes these in a modal CGCG tuning rather than the normal CGDA tuning and I think string gauges here are 49w, 36w, 26w, 20w low to high.