Hi Marty, Any progress with the bigger and lower instruments? Do you have a timetable for building them?
Hi Bruce, I am working on details for those instruments. One of the biggest obstacles was the build process and the investment it takes to gear up for it. I recently discovered (or really re-discovered) a shortcut developed by another luthier (Leroy Beal) which will allow me much more flexibility and will reduce the time it takes to gear up for new models - in theory at least. The process is much like violin construction, but instead of the mold being removed, the mold becomes a shelf which takes a lot of the string tension load and provides a flat glue surface for the top and back plates. With some adaptation, Leroy's approach merges with what I'm already doing into a pretty powerful system. This solves a lot of the problems which lead to the Leviathan shape and opens the door for traditional guitar body shapes (though I still have ergonomics concerns about larger guitar body shapes), reduces material waste, etc. So I'm very excited about it, especially since I can just build a prototype without having to design a complicated machine to assemble each body style. The body itself is the tooling. I hope to build a Leviathan (mandocello) and Chimera (OM) concurrently with this batch of mandolins, but they will be lower priority. Probably end of summer before prototypes are proven. Thanks for checking in, I'll post progress as the prototypes are built.
Interesting, Marty. I'm not sure if I completely understand this shortcut.
I probably made it sound a lot more complicated than it is... From Leroy's site:
Ok, now it makes perfect sense. That is sort of what I was picturing. Thanks!
