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.
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