Graduation for Saga AM-10?

[Tom Haywood]

I think a few of us have glued the tone bars on the "wrong" side at least once. It may turn out to be your best sounding mandolin.

[HoGo]

I think a few of us have glued the tone bars on the "wrong" side at least once. It may turn out to be your best sounding mandolin.

I wouldn't care too much about any of the exotic theories and just build to well known specs as James wrote. I would just use simple straight tapered tonebars. I've played some mandolins with "scalloped" bars and they were not very impressive.

[JeffLearman]

I took your advice, J Condino, and didn't replace the tonebars. It's assembled and when my son has a moment we'll use his routing table to remove the overhang on the back. So, next step is finishing.

I think I'd like to go a bit dark, as I don't think the wood is particularly lovely, with some blemishes on the neck & back. I've done very little staining, though, so I want to stick with a fairly easy plan. I'd be interested if anyone has suggestions for stain colors to use.

The top looks OK, just that stripe where the two halves are glued together. I can test-stain some plain pine to get an idea how that works. The grain will be different but not enough to matter.

The back is maple. Might be nice to go with a contrasting color, since it won't match anything else anyway. It has a notable blemish that might be nice to minimize. On the other hand it has these flames that might look sweet if enhanced. (In one of my first posts I thought that was water streaks but nope.)

The neck is also maple, but very different from the back. Plus the neck has two different pieces with very different color glued together. Fortunately this is at a place that's not too noticeable.

The headstock front has a rosewood veneer. No idea what I should do there but tempted to leave it alone.

Any suggestions? Here are the latest pictures, including a full family photo.

[JeffLearman]

Update: I did finally finish it: https://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/t...inishing/page2

When I strung it, a day later I saw that it's what evidently we call "sunken." Evidently I went too thin. Someday maybe I'll have someone with the proper tools measure, but I'm pretty sure I hit the specs. Another factor might be that the bridge doesn't fall right on the crown of the arch: it's shifted an inch or two forward (toward the neck.) The sinking was dramatic on the treble side (where the tonebar was more shaved.) Not bad on the bass end.

Well, after a lot of hemming and hawing, I stuck in a (temporary) sound post under the treble end of the bridge. I also restrung. I had ordered lighter strings (EJ62 80/20 Bronze, 10-34) hoping that would do the job but after thinking about it (and seeing how much it sank) I feel that alone won't do the job.

Now that the bridge isn't a moving target, I was able to set it up a lot better (I also leveled frets as fretting at 12 stopped at 15.) It's a lot more fun to play with decent action & intonation. It lost a good bit of volume, with less sustain on the top strings. But I don't play on stage, so it's plenty loud enough to play at home.

Thanks for all the help. The mistakes are all mine, good advice was from you guys! And in the end, I have a playable mando. (Frankly, before adding the soundpost, it sounded better to me than my fiddle/mando player's. It had more bottom end, and sang as much in the highs, with LOTS of dynamic range. He said his mando is nothing special but decent. I don't recall the brand.)

Later I'll post some pics and audio.