I have been working on my #13 mandolin for about a week and it has been one major headache after another. I guess I messed up when I decided to try and build the cheapest mandolin that I could get away with but its probably because it is #13. First thing I did was cut the back out of a piece of 1/8" plywood then noticed that the inside had a nice piece of flamed maple veneer on it but there wasn't enough left to cut another back so I decided to put some quilted maple veneer on the back which was a book matched piece and I didn't close the gap completely and got the seam crooked instead of lined up with the neck which in turn makes the neck look crooked when viewing from the back. I was working on the headstock with an exacto knife and managed to cut a huge chunk off a nicely planned out point which caused me to have to sand it down to a different shape which looks ok but is not what I wanted. Then came the top a book matched pair of flamed Aspen but after carving the top out, the flames wound up as router shavings because the flame didn't go all the way through. Then I was going to put F-holes on this one but I sanded it so thin that I sanded a hole where the oval hole would go, oh well, I will just make it an oval hole so I glued it on and it looked ok but when I was inserting the neck, I forced it and put a 5" crack in the top. So... I pulled the top off and made a one piece top out of Poplar, only then did I realize that my neck angle was a little high, too high for a normal bridge but just right for an awkwardly huge bridge, then I had an Idea that I could make that Resonator Mandolin that I have always wanted to build out of this so I got out that aluminum skillet lid that I had been saving and set it on the top and It added the correct amount of height that I needed but to have the resonator properly centered on the top, threw my fret scale off so now instead of 13-7/8" I need 15-1/2" which means that I have to remove the fretboard and make a new one and that is where I am now. Talk about #13 giving me a hard time but I don't give up that easily I will make this mandolin work if it's the last thing that I do! Despite all this trouble, I like being challenged and having to adapt and overcome the situation and this may turn out to be a great instrument. I'll let you know what happens.
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