Howe-Orme mandolinetto neck joint.

[MANDOLINMYSTER]

Has anybody had the pleasure of resetting a neck on a little howe orme mandolinetto.
I have one on the bench in need of a neck reset.
I have examined the neck block which is very shallow and there is an unusual grafted piece which creates the support for the elevated finger board extension.
I have removed the fingerboard and there is no visual sign of a tenon or dovetail.
Any insight would be appriciated.

Thanks,
Mike

[Alfons]

Hi Mike, On my small one, the neck was very loose, and when removed, it turned out that the only thing still holding it together was a small wooden dowel that went into the block. As you observed, there wasn't a whole lot of structure in there. The area where the neck sets into the block is rather shallow. My luthier also had the neck off of a mandola sized version of this instrument, which unfortunately, and unknown to us in advance, someone had put a metal screw through the neck heel. In both cases, there was not a dovetail, and not a huge amount of wood to glue to. He did get them both back together and they have been stable for some years. I definitely would not put heavy strings on it. Unfortunately, I cannot find the photos I thought I had of the work in progress. If I can find a photo of that joint I'll post it, but it's not looking good for that at the moment. I'll see if the gentleman who did the work for me would like to comment.

[Alfons]

OK, I recovered a couple of photos of the neck joint, courtesy of Terry Straker (Guitar Works Ltd of Evanston IL). He is the luthier that saved this mandola for me, and it had a couple of nasty surprises for us along the way. It's a great instrument and Terry did some amazing work to bring it back to its former glory. Just for fun I also included a photo of the unfortunate refinish job this had before I brought it to Terry.

[MANDOLINMYSTER]

Its a dowel. What a sneaky little bugge.

[MANDOLINMYSTER]

in
Here is the fingerboard extension part. The dowel went into it as well.

[MANDOLINMYSTER]

The more I look at this I think the dowel is only used to mount the fingerboard extension.I believe the neck joint is simply a tenon. I will find out more once I get it apart.

[MANDOLINMYSTER]

Very interesting. The dowel goes thru the heel. Humm, not sure what the purpose is. Well the neck is off and now to clean things up, shape the tenon and get the neck angle back to a playable angle.

[pops1]

Looks like the same neck joint the violin family of instruments uses.

[Ginridge]

This looks like the butt joints that I have seen an a number of early Bruno guitars. It was just held together from the glue tension on the large surface areas. Since the guitar was originally designed for gut strings, this would have been an effective joint in it's day... not so much with steel strings!





This particular guitar was "glued" together with Auto body Bondo... a very nasty mess to remove!