DONE!

Ok strung this up tonight and it sounds pretty good, decent volume and good sustain... IMHO.. I did end up making the low C pair and Octave pair, we will see if I change that in the future.. Not sure if the action is still a bit high but going to play it for a bit and  see..

Getting Very Close

So the finish is done a satin sort of French Polish, not too shiny, I like it.. The tuners are on a nut & Saddle are made and tonight I glued on the bridge... Should be making music with this Mandocello pretty soon..

I think at least for the start I'm going to string it up with the C string pair as an Octave pair its easy to change if I don't like it.. But harder to go the other direction...

French Polish so far my favourite finish

Front view

Back view

Tuners front

Tuners back

The only way I could set the intonation was to actually string it up
with a temporary tailpiece and just fiddle with the bridge position...
actually 2mm of compensation came out pretty close

Gluing on the bridge

Pore Filling

I'm still not 100% sure I personally like a pore filled instrument but it is pretty much the standard for instrument building these days..

Typically I use z-poxy to pore fill & it works well enough. For this instrument it left it a bit heavier than I have in the past in the hopes of getting a better French polish on top of it.. We will see how that works..

Now on to the French polish...

Neck & Fingerboard

SO the next somewhat nerve wracking step in construction is to route the tenon on the neck to fit in to the already routed mortise. The main reason for the nerves is getting the angle of the neck right somewhere around 88 or 89 degrees. I don't actually measure the angle, I just adjust it to get the proper height above the future bridge location..

Then the fingerboard needs to be slotted and tapered, I have a nice jig I made for slotting fingerboards but of course it will not work on fanned frets.. oh well i could use my new fingerboard tapering jig..

My first time using a Japanese style saw for cutting fret slots.. works great

\Looks fine to me

The fingerboard next to the neck

My tapering jig