Welcome back to another entry about this Mandolin build. When we saw this instrument last time we were just going about the first stages of the neck and some of the carving in the reinforcements of the sound board. We are speeding some things up by making the heel and carving it now. It is a totally different thing from the usual Spanish Heel we are just to see in these posts; but it is not something out of the world.
Let's get to it!
Checking and templates
We needed a section to check on the rest of the work we did last time. As you can see the head stock base is already in place and it turned out smoothly. Then there is the carving of the bars of the sound board. The bars that are crossed presented a challenge, but giving them shape helped us understand the sound qualities of the instrument we are going to make.
On the other hand, before tackling the heel of the neck, we needed to create some templates to understand how it was going to look. The idea of this heel is that the sides go glued to the sides of the neck. Contrary to what happens in guitars and similar instruments, the sides do not get slots in the neck. This proses an interesting outlook on the shaping of the heel.
It will be more clear in the section that goes about it. For the time being take a look at the templates and understand that these are a placeholder for the structure. It is a way to draw some lines to then make the cuts and carve.
Making the heel
Something that did not change in this build was the fact of making the heel out of pieces of wood. We have another blank that we will cut into pieces to make the parts of the heel. How many parts? That is entirely up to the builder's design. In this case, the heel will have a height of 6cm. That is not the tallest point on the back of the instrument. It is actually where it stats to fall. This mandolin will have a rounded back.
Once we have determined that we'll use 3 cuts to make the heel, we do the thing and use the saw to make the blocks. Then we clean the faces of each block including some passes of the hand plane and sanding them. The next stage is to create a single unit out of these blocks. We need to be careful to avoid any movement during the glue up.
Meanwhile, we can start making the lines on the upper side of the neck to make sure we have the dimensions of the neck and the marks for the sides and other parts. When the block is ready, we can make the glue up to the back side of the neck and let this piece rest.
Carving the heel
Now comes the fun part!
We have to start by removing any uneven parts of the glued block. Then we can start making the lines we need to have the drawing of the heel we are going to carve out. The next step is to make some cuts. These are not for slots. Rather, we want to have a sort of stop to know how much we are carving in certain sections of the heel.
We follow this up by making first the top portion of the heel by making a cut to get closer to the line. After this, we are carving with a chisel and then sanding until we have the curve we are looking for on the top portion of the heel.
Finally, we can make the cut at the lower part of the neck to create an even end to this part. And with that out of the way, we carve the side curves. These will give the sides the las bit of curvature as the create a sort of drop shape. And we add an extra one for the reinforcement. All of this work is done by chiseling away material and then sanding until we get really close to the lines.
And with this we can take a break until the next entry. This is a tough project but it is not impossible. It is just a matter of patience and not rushing any task. Thanks a lot for reading. See you next time!
| Number | Entry |
|---|---|
| 1 | The First Mandolin |
| 2 | Starting a Neck |
Photos 📷: Redmi Note 13
Thumbnail 🖼️: Canva.
Editing 🎬:Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
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