1900s Howe-Orme Cylinder-Top Mandola

This astounding instrument is painfully rare and sounds obnoxiously good. We had a smaller version of one of these in last year with a 17" scale but this one has a long, 20" scale length and would these days probably be classified as an octave mandolin because of that. It's super-lightweight, super-lightly-built, and just sings. It hurts that we didn't get a video clip of it!

When stringing-up a long-scale mandola like this, one can just use mandolin strings -- we used a 34w-10 light set for this -- to tune to standard CGDA. The bridge, of course, needs to be compensated for the two-plain, two-wound course style, too, rather than the Gibson-style three-wound, one-plain style. "Normal" mandola strings would turn the top on this guy into toast as they're significantly heavier.

Jose worked this one over -- repairing a few cracks, giving it an excellent level/dress of the frets, and setting it up and recompensating/adjusting the bridge as needed.