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!!