Mini classical to octave mandolin: final transformation

As of today, i can play this thing and it holds its tune. There’s a worrying crack at the top of the headstock, but it survived my sound test. I'll see how it holds over time. If it doesn't, I may have to add a headstock replacement to this project. 

From crap six string. I didn't have even a photo from when i took pictures of all my instruments for insurance because i didn’t bother, so this the best Before picture.

 

To its current form as Octave Mandolin. That’s half a mando bridge after Scott pointed out the issues with a full bridge.

With a brief sound test.just to make sure: 

Mini-classical guitar to Octave mandolin conversion: PART 2

 Going through this process makes me appreciate just how crappy some crappy instruments are. If this kids guitar weren't so cheap, it would make conversion a little easier. Progress appears to be two steps forward, one step back. 

Converting the headstock to an 8-string set up has been fun and very much trial and error. I think I am getting close.

With the holes filled in, I took the wide paddle of the original and decided to trim it way back to accommodate the tuning peg sets. I cut a rough shape of the headstock with a handsaw. Once I did the rough cut, I could file and sand it back to something more along what I was hoping for. 

My first attempt at drilling the new holes for the tuning pegs was not successful. I got the holes lined up fine. But they were too low on the head so that the metal went over the edge. For a day or two I was willing to live with it. But the more I thought about it, the more it bugged me, so I did the unthinkable and filled in the holes again with some dowels, sanded them back, and drilled in another set of holes. 

 With the image directly above, you can see where the new holes compare with the original ones. There's a cartoonish oblong arrangement to the peg sets, but it looks good to me, so I will go with that. 

....

This project is experimental so I go back and forth with the idea of living with a flaw and deciding to rework the instrument to eliminate or improve that flaw. Another example of this was the dreaded bridge. 

It wouldn't be so bad removing a bridge. It's not difficult with a putty knife and a hair dryer to loosen the glue. But I suspect getting the glue on an unfinished top was too much work for this guitar manufacturer, so in addition to the glue, the bridge had two screws drilled into the body. The heads of the screws were covered over so I couldn't unscrew it. I got Leo to take a picture of the inside of the guitar with his iPhone (my phone wouldn't fit), and I could see how the screws were fastened with nuts on the underside. No way to get those off without doing some damage. 

At first I thought I'd just live with the bridge as is. After all, it was reasonably well fastened to the body, so maybe adding two more strings wouldn't be so disruptive to the integrity of the instrument. 

I had been waiting for an order of stains and dyes to arrive to put on the neck and top. Still not sure what I'm doing with that. While I was doing that, I puzzled over how to make this bridge work. Nothing seemed to suggest itself. Originally, I wanted to add a tailpiece to the end and replace the saddle on the original bridge. But the bridge is fairly bulky, so strings coming off a tailpiece wouldn't reach the saddle before bumping into the back of the bridge. Then I considered adding a couple of holes to the bridge to accommodate the two extra strings. But the spacing was off, and those two screws were right in the way of where the new holes should go. Time for some drastic action. 

So here I go with the putty knife and hair dryer. This works better than I had thought. The glue loosens up immediately, and I was able to separate the entire bridge from the top except for where the screws were. 

The next step involved some destruction. That bridge was not great anyway.

I managed to remove the screw cover, but it was impossible to unscrew it. The nut was just too tight, or it had fused with age. So I had to saw through it with my trusty handsaw. That little saw has been the most underrated tool for any of my projects so far. 

The photo above looks pretty rough, but I was thrilled with the results. Looks like the top under the bridge had finish on it, which doesn't bode well for the adhesion of the glue. Unfortunately, in sawing through the screws I got a bit carried away and gouged out some areas in the top. Sloppy. So a thorough schedule of sanding from 80-120-220-320 took care of most of it. 

I feel like I'm at the point where I can apply a stain or colour and have a better looking top than the original had provided. And now I can affix a tailpiece and a floating bridge. The back and sides remains a kind of cherry red. I'm not thrilled with it, but I don't know if even heavy sanding would get me to something workable. I've been thinking about hydrodripping. 

My worry at this point is that tailpieces are mostly available for mandolins where they don't go far enough down the bottom to be properly centred (a mandolin body is about half the depth of this guitar). And bridges tend to be designed for archtops. So I'll have to see what I find out there. I had earlier been browsing hinges at HomeDepot to see if anything would serve as a suitable replacement for the tailpiece.  

NEW PROJECT: Mini-classical guitar to Octave mandolin conversion: PART 1

Got tired of looking at this crappy little guitar I bought for the boys many years ago. It's a half-size classical, pretty cheap, nothing fancy. I was playing it the other day and the saddle disintegrated. Saddle and nut are cheap plastic. So I figured it was time for a change! 

I was looking for an Octave Mandolin in craigslist without success so I thought I would try my hand at converting my guitar to one. Others have done it, and there are some websites to that effect. I'm always kind of shocked to see people converting nice guitars like Martins and Taylors to an octave mandolin. I guess they are confident in their workmanship. Me not so much. I'm still learning this stuff. Also, the bane of my existence, I don't really have a good workspace to do extended projects so I wanted to try something that I could fail and it wouldn't kill me to wreck a good instrument. 

I started with my kids' half size classical guitar:

Here's my start. My first challenge was to narrow the neck. I didn't want the full width of a classical guitar. Even for a kids guitar, the neck was quite wide. So trimmed 5 mm off each side. This was no mean feat. 

I used the two E strings as a straight guide to where I wanted to trim back. I say 'trim'. I filed and sanded the neck by hand. The start of these things is always rough:

Here's my trying to take off the edge one fret at a time. I was filing into the wood but I was also wondering about how to take the frets back. Ultimately, I just filed them back as well. Not as much trouble as I had anticipated. 

After a while I got something down to more or less the right shape. You can see I didn't file back the neck where it covers the body. I wasn't really sure of how to do that, and I don't play that far down anyway, so I just left it. It means the neck tapers suddenly but that's ok. This is an experiment. 

I ended up sanding back all the finish of the neck, which is fine since this gives me a chance to do some more finishing. I am hoping to put Tung Oil on this one for a smoother feel. The original had a gloss that was tough but not very good for moving up and down the neck. 

With the neck in a state where I could leave it, I moved on to the peghead. This guitar has the classical style peghead with side tuners. I wanted to put some mandolin tuners on this one (even a cheap set from Stewmac would be better than these crappy ones on the guitar, so this thing was getting an improvement already). 

But this means I have to alter the peghead to make it take on the mandolin tuners. 

My plan was to plug the spaces in the peghead with a couple of pieces of scrap wood and some dowels for the side holes. So this was going to look quite a bit different. 

To make the wood fit the spaces required a lot of filing and sanding again:

So far so good. 

The backside is less finished at this point:

I also discovered that this peghead is much too thick for my tunes. Pegheads on smaller instruments like my tenor guitar and mandolin are about 1.5 cms. The one on this guitar is 2 cm, so my next step is to shave off .5 cm from the back. Or maybe a bit more, as I want to add some veneer to cover the alteration job. I haven't done this yet, but the plan is to borrow an orbital sander and go at this with some 60-80 grit till I get things even out. As the photo shows, I started with a file,  but this wasn't doing much. So either I need some better files or I need to find another way to remove 5 mm of wood. 

more pickguard adventures

 Although I liked the style of my walnut wood veneer pickguard in the traditional tele shape, I wasn't completely happy with the way it turned out after the lacquer coat. Some of the surface seemed to shrink cause it to ripple in places and making the veneer look too much like a vinyl covering. Not cool. 

I think the black on wood brown looks pretty cool, but I still wanted to see what else I could do. I saw online some people had made pickguards just out of cheap birch plywood, so I bought a couple of sheets. This also allowed me to depart from the traditional pickguard shape and try my own design. I wanted a bit more curvy look, so after a few tries I came up with something like this:

Because the wood is so thin, I had to use hand tools to shape things out. I started with a jigsaw and it just ripped the wood to shreds so I just used my little hand saw, some files and the dremel for sanding the edges. In the end, I got something that looked like a cross between a batman look and the map of Australia. Either way, there was potential.

The birch is pretty plain and white. I was originally thinking about staining dark like the other pickguard, getting close to black but having the grain show through. But then I saw some other crazy designs out there, and I watched a few videos on Shuo Sugi Ban, wood burning Japanese style. I didn't have the right wood or the right tools for this. I didn't have a torch, but I did have a camping stove, so I thought I would try getting a light burnt look, which would give more of an edge to the guitar and add some more woody shades to the whole thing. 

After some experimenting, I decided to go for it. Super fun. It's easy to go wrong here, but making mistakes on a badass burnt look didn't seem to add to the risk of ruining the product. I probably could have gone even further, but I liked the way the wood carmelized its colour under the blue flame of my camp stove. A couple times it caught fire, especially around the pickup hole, but I just blew it out, and that turned out to be the coolest visual effect. I charred it all around the edges as well, which worked well with the slightly sanded bevel I had achieved.I added a few coats of Arm R Seal to make it smooth and give it some gloss. 

Many adjustments back and forth, and this is what I ended up with.

I think this looks pretty cool. In the process of making this, I had the old pickguard off for a few days, and I really like the look of the body. It seems a shame to cover up so much of it with a pickguard, so this has less surface area than a regular one. I am thinking I won't screw this into the body because it's a custom shape and the holes wouldn't align with a regular pickguard should I ever decide to go back there. But I doubt it. In fact, while making this, I was considering just making a wooden pickguard ring for the pickup pocket and leaving it mostly showing the body. But I'm not sure. I'll see how I like this. At the moment, it has a cool cowboy vibe. Making a pickguard from scratch is pretty fun. It seems like something I could do to transform the look if I ever got tired of this one. 

Now just need to screw the pickup into the pickguard and reset everything to see how it feels against the hand while playing. 

The problem with doing a single build is that there are too many options, so if this one is up and running, maybe it's time for another!! 

finishing the body and neck

 I departed from the kit with a few of the parts. The kit comes with a top loader bridge. From what I have read, it's perfectly fine although with everything people entrench themselves in for/against camps. I could have lived with it, but I was interested in stringing the guitar through the body instead of just the bridge. Just seems like there's more stability that way. 

Of course, this meant drilling holes through the body. Always a challenge without good tools like a proper drill press. I ended up making a little jig to guide the holes, but even then I felt like I was doing way too much eyeballing for precise work. And the results show that. I didn't get perfect alignment. I suppose it is close enough and as long as no one is studying my work closely, it will get by. 

So now I'm putting on the bridge and the pickups and adding the tuners. Easy enough work, but as always I realize how much you can't rush anything 

Finished decal work. The uke has a cooler logo but it didn't translate so well on the dark wood. 

This is straightforward enough although I do always hesitate before drilling into the finished wood. For the kit, I just followed the instructions step by step, but now I wonder if it's better to assemble and fit everything first and finish last, as the term 'finish' suggests. 

Adding a bit of wax to the screws before putting them into the hard maple to prevent any horrifying cracking of the wood. 

Apply clear lacquer, add waterslide decals

 I watched the guy from Northwest guitar do this seamlessly. After several viewings, I was ready to try it. 

Started with some possible decals:

I like the idea of calling this guitar a Tidalcaster since it is a telecaster body. But Tidal Flattercaster, named after my home community of Tidal Flats Housing Co-op, seemed to fit best, so it won. I'm using a font that resembles the traditional Fender font. 

The DS logo was for my ukulele headstock. What I learned about this is when you've got a dark background (walnut coloured headstock), you really need to accentuate the lighter colours. My decals look okay on an amber maple background, not so much on dark walnut. 

This photo shows the two headstocks and the pickguard after a couple of coats of clear lacquer. 

When I look at this picture, I wonder whether I need a full pickguard. I like the woody look with the paisley bridge and switchplate.

That looks pretty good. Except under certain light, you can't see the decal outline. I've wet sanded it after 3 coats of clear gloss lacquer and then added two more coats. I'll repeat the process and then I'll stop. The guitar headstock is in good shape but with the uke I over-sanded it and dug into the logo, so it's less successful. 

Clear lacquer is toxic and pungent, so I am trying to spray outside on our front deck in the early evening when no one seems to be around. So far so good, but I wish I could do this somewhere more secluded. I let the lacquer dry for at least 10 minutes, and then I bring everything inside to dry overnight. I put both instruments by a bedroom window with three fans circulating air throughout the room but nothing directly on the headstocks. There's no lingering smell. 

I also noticed that when the lacquer dried on the pickguard, it rippled the wood veneer anywhere it wasn't fully glued. I'm not keen on that. The pickguard looks awesome but I'm disappointed in that little flaw. 

Starting to come together.

more pickguards

One realized benefit of the full kit is the limited decision making involved in parts. On the other hand, the downside is you have to work with what is provided even if it might not be the best fit or quality. 

Pickguards are a basic example of this. The Stewmac kit provides a nice basic black pickguard with chamftered edges showing black and white layers. It's good but not great but not crap either. 

I thought this might be an area to do some customizing. So I've looked into different materials, including: 

• plastic
• bakelite
• wood
• copper

PART 1

You can go as crazy as you want with this. And if you have some artistic vision, skill and the right tools, you can really go to town. The guy at Flatt Guitars in Tacoma makes super cool pickguards.I love this Ebony Gator pickguard. 

I'm not close to that level of ability, but I wanted something other than the basic colour. At first I was thinking the copper would be a cool look, but I wasn't sure about the tools needed. Apparently, you can get a tool called a nibbler that you can fasten to your drill to shape the metal. 

But I saw a few wooden pickguards that looked cool. I was wondering about shaping the wood, whether I needed a router or a scroll saw, neither of which I have. I did see on YouTube a guy made a pickguard out of wood veneer, which is thin enough to cut with scissors. That's my level of craftsmanship. 

So I bought some walnut veneer at Michaels. Seems overpriced at $15 so I should look for alternatives. 

Here's what it looked like after shaping:

That is a nice woody look, but it doesn't match the guitar body, so I want to darken the wood to something close to black.I sanded this lightly with some 400 grit so it is completely smooth. It is glued to a plastic pickguard that Scott cut on his laser cutter. It is a little bit thicker than the black plastic pickguard that came with the kit. It feels pretty solid.

The glueing was a bit of a gong show. I did not do a good job of this. In general I think I would do this differently. I would glue a veneer blank to my clear plastic pickguard and then cut it out after the glue had dried. The way I've done it here, there are a few places where it doesn't quite line up some I'm missing a sliver of wood. I will try to sand that back. 

PART 2 

I drilled the screw holes.and tried my hand at countersinking the holes for a better set up and to let the kit screws fit. I did that with my cordless drill and a countersink bit. The trick was going through the veneer and then to the plastic/epoxy without tearing out the veneer. 

I seemed to manage with that. Afterwards, I applied a coat of black minwax gel stain. I was persuaded to go with the gel stain instead of the regular stain simply because the gel seems a bit more foolproof. Someone described it as a cross between stain and paint. I wanted to get the wood as dark as possible while keeping the grain visible. The walnut is nice but probably wouldn't work for this particular guitar body.

So below is the set up for drilling and staining. My bench is sitting under an umbrella while it rains lightly outside. 

And then here is the result of a single coat. What a difference!!

I'm pretty happy with the results. One of the holes looks a bit out of place but I guess that doesn't matter too much if I'm only drilling to suit this pickguard. 

Earlier today, I bought a couple of small sheets of birch plywood from DeSerres. (a couple bucks each). I might experiment with cutting another pickguard. I like the idea of using wood as long as I can put a hard clear finish on it after. The interesting thing to note is I could try different colours at some later point to change the look of the guitar. But my preliminary look at the dark stained pickguard suggests this is the right colour. It looks awesome.