Hamlett Manor, the back forty.
Hamlett Manor, the back forty.
Im glad to see my snipet has arroused some great discussion. My 3-400 hr quote was just an estimate posssibly an over estimate) that I made after building only two instruments. I would have to say I am slower than the more experienced builders out there. I've asked my self many of the same questions that I've read on this post about pricing etc. and have thought twice about a starting price for my Fs to be at $2,300 (I'm still not sure). I chose to build because I am both an artist and a perfectionist at heart and I am fascinated with the modern mandolin. Other things that compell me to build are overpriced and average sounding instruments. Like I said, I build because of the fascination but also because I cant practice my playing and be satisfied if my instrument dosent sound how I would like it to. So, I figured I would make it sound how I want it to.
Dan Voight
dan@voightmandolins.com
www.voightmandolins.com
https://www.instagram.com/danvoightmandolins/
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When I first started making archtop guitars I kept a time log of the various processes. The first couple archtops took about 100 hrs before starting the finish. I thought I could improve on that, so continued keeping my time log. Well, the guitars got better and better and took longer and longer. It now takes me upwards of 150 hours to make one, more if it gets tricky. I just finished one early January that took me over 250 hrs. It's kinda fancy.
When I started making mandolins I thought the process was extremely complicated and took way too long. The better I got at doing this the longer it took. There is no easy way.
As with a lot of things there is no easy way...
Look up (to see whats comin down)
I did a rough tally of the hours spent building my first mandolin, and it added up to 1000 hours! If I were to be paid fairly for my hours, I'd need to sell it for at least £10,000 - given that it was 1000 hours of 'skilled' labour. As it is, I've become too attached to it to want to sell it and, fortunately, have not been in a position that I have had to sell it. Besides, nobody in their right mind would spend that much on a mandolin, much less a somewhat rough-round-the-edges prototype from a novice maker. My subsequent instruments have taken significantly less time, and I aim to bring it down to about 100 hours - an achievable goal, I think, especially since I am primarily interested in flat-topped, flat-backed instruments. That, I hope, would enable me to charge competitive prices and still be able to pay the rent and put food on the table.
Of course, I'm living in Cloud Cuckoo Land - I realise that. Making 20 mandolins a year is one thing, selling them is another - and convincing people that it's worth spending £1000 when they could pick up a Korean-made cheapie for £100 or less. But if I let myself believe it wasn't possible, I'd give it up.
£1000 ($1960.00) will get you four Big Muddy (formerly Mid-Missouri) flat tops in the USA. I would think to be competitive building flat tops you will need to be able to build them start to finish in 40 or 50 hours each.
The first mandolin I built was a flat top with HPL back and sides. If memory serves me correctly it took less than 30 hours start to finish. Of course it is not of the quality to sell but almost three years later it is still quite playable and does not look to bad.
Bill Snyder
20 mandolins a year may be achievable for some builders, but I have never been able to do that! Works out to about 1.7 per month, and if you're building 2 F5's at 200 hrs each that's 340 hours a month...over 80 hours a week, 52 weeks a year.
Tempting, but no... # #
A flat top and back Army Navy style mando shouldn't take any more than about 15 to 20 hours unless you are going to go crazy with binding, purfling, and inlay. In my teaching, the students do their first mando in about 28 hours with a lot of lecture time. True, there's a pre-machined neck, a slotted fingerboard, and the top and back seams are done ahead of time to cut down on time spent watching the glue dry, but I don't have more than about an hour and a half into those steps, so it's still a 30 hour mandolin...and that's with students many of whom never did anything like this before.
I think that anyone wanting to do this for a living better give up on the "nobility of excess time"...that one up-manship where we claim to put many hours more into the process than should be there. "Oh look how much time I've spent on this...it must be wonderful!" Sorry, folks, that doesn't cut it in the real world. We don't get paid for effort; we get paid for results.
In my shop, the closest thing to a production flat mando that we build are our tenor ukes, and we have less than fifteen hours into each one, and we haven't gotten to CNC'ing the necks yet on those. I want to see us build those in about ten hours. That's with one employee doing the whole build other than spraying which I do. We have to wholesale our bottom of the line ukes for under $450.00...less than Gryphon Stringed Instruments charges for a Martin neck reset/refret. Out of that $450.00 come parts, labor, overhead, and profit. And we can do that...if we keep the build time under control. There's nothing we do right now that couldn't be done in a one-man shop, either.
Jim Olson hit a pace of 50 guitars a year in his one man shop. That's good...but it's not Taylor or Martin pace. I think they've got about 8 hours into a standard D-28 now...
So no navel gazing, guys. Make every hour you put in meaningful and learn to work assuredly and confidently. Get the grunt work out of the way as fast as humanly possible, and only put in the painstaking work where it counts in the results. No sanding the interior end blocks to 1200 grit....
As usual, Rick is spot on.
I was talking to George Lowden a few months ago (he makes guitars for those of you who don't realise that there's a world beyond 8 strings!!) and he was sying that his big jump was when he got the concept of speed building into his head.
Part of it came form the better availability of materials and power tools.(hand rubbing yacht varnish to a gloss finish takes AGES!!!!!)
I can make my mandonaught guitar shaped mandos in under 20 hours, and a fair bit of that is rubbing out the finish.
a power polisher would take another couple of hours off.
But for me as a hobby builder, it isn't a race. when I'm quoting for a friend it's pretty much materials cost. For a stranger, to be honest it's only a little more than THAT!!!
hey!! I got my own Syndrome!!!!Originally Posted by stout1
I'm sorry, an Army/Navy mandolin is a far shot from a $10,000 F5 mandolin. Shoving a top through a Timesaver is a lot easier than carving and graduating a top. Machined neck...I see. Sounds a long way from "handbuilt"...more like "kit" assembly.
"Nobility of time"? #I don't claim to put in "many hours more into the process than there should be". That's how long it takes. I've been doing this for quite a while...I know where the shortcuts are.
I know Jim Olson. He is so CNC'd and jigged out that Collings could take a lesson from him. He builds flat top guitars. If he can assemble 50 a year. good for him. At a starting price of 14K I guess he'll pay for his factory.
There is no comparison between building a flat top guitar and an arched mandolin.
Tell me that you don't use a D/A sander, you hand sand your instruments.
Tell me that there is no difference between using 6 coats of lacquer and using varnish and French polish.
Tell me that it's just as easy to bind an F5 as it is to bind a guitar.
I built flat top guitars in the '70's...I know what's involved.
How much time is involved with the curing of glues and finishes? Is this figure included or excluded from total build time? There must be some difference between the time quoted as build time for the customer and actual hands-on time.
I ask because I'm assuming once the building process has matured, building in batches has to save some time in the overall build cycle.
Jerry, we're talking hands on time here. Takes a good month for varnish to dry, and 10-15 days to apply.
Depends what you mean by buiding in batches. I build 4-6 necks at the same time, rout 4-6 tops and backs at the same time, but when I start a box, it's one at a time. When I get one strung up in the white I start another. While it may take a little longer to do that way, I don't think it amounts to much. The way I have things set up, I can change from process to process quickly, so I don't lose any time going from say glueing on a top to routing for binding. The advantage I see in doing it this way is that I devote all my attention to graduating, tuning, detailing one box at a time.
Thanks Hans. I figured that is what you guys were talking about.
Thanks guys for reminding all of these wonderfully talented gentlemen (and ladies) that they are charging way to little for their works of art! #I am glad that it is partially a labor of love (except for Hamlett) or none of us would be able to afford these things. #My gratitude goes out to all of these folks and I for one greatly appreciate their dedication to their craft. #It is my goal to own "one of each" #- #probably never will, but I can dream!
Thanks again to all of you (even Hamlett who is just in it for the money!
Linksmaker
You guys who keep building them...keep doing that so I can buy yet another mando that I will not make any money with.
I;m with Hans on this. Guitars and flat top mandolins are not in the same universe as an F style mandolin. I have stopped making F style mandolins, simply because I can build 4-5 guitars in the time it takes me to make one F style(I'm slower than most of you with the mandolins <bg>, so to be fair to myself, I'd have to charge the same as those 5 guitars for the one F style mando. Not gonna happen..., so I stopped making them. An A-5 mandolin can be done in about the same time as a guitar, for me.
Even in a "factory" setting, building mandolins is quite a bit different from building guitars. It still takes many hours to do the process. Often they are built in batches so you can do the same process on several and save a little time, but it is still very time consuming Especially if you do not do much with the CNC. The only advantage we may have is experience. We may have done some of the processes so often that we are faster than some. Our spray booths are also very nice and we have people to help with some of the more dreary tasks, like scraping binding. We have a lady who has done this for 20 years and enjoys doing that task. I would be willing to do that for about 4 minutes before wanting to shoot myself! In all, whether it is built in our shop or a smaller shop, it is VERY labor intensive and costly to build. We may have some help in saving small amounts of time by our process, but we also have substantially higher costs for rent, labor, etc. In all, hats off to each of the wonderful luthiers who visit the cafe. They deserve our appreciation no matter the model they make or whether it is our favorite. The work invested must be a work of love or you could not afford to do it.
Have a Great Day!
Joe Vest
We gotta have her cloned!
John Hamlett
www.hamlettinstruments.com
I'll second the cloning of the binding scraper lady, cause most of the time I'm happy working on mandos... till I've scraped binding for two weeks.
I'm fortunate to also have a lady who enjoys binding scraping...that is to say,she enjoys it more than shaking hands with Mr. Cat o'ninetails.
Jim
So I'm seeing 120 to 300 to 400 hours for an F-5, right? That's a hell of a spread, assuming quality of craft to be about the same. Where do the extra hours go past 120? Sorry, but the last time I built an archtop it came in at about 120 hours. It's the mando-guitar on page 101 of String Letter Press' "Custom Guitars" book. You can also see interior shots on Frank Ford's site. Fully carved top and back, lots of lines of purfling, bound "F" holes, approximately mandola sized. That 120 hours included making the bending form for a Fox bender and making the mold. So it doesn't have a scroll.... I don't claim to be a speed demon luthier, but I also just don't see where the time goes after that 120 hours or so. If you are focused and know how to work efficiently, you should be able to have a top and back rough carved in less than two days. I had the afore mentioned archtop plates roughed in five hours, and I took another five or so in refining the shapes and graduations and doing the recurves. My only "trick" was using a pin router for terrace carving the outside arch, and then flipping the plates over and rough carving the insides parallel to the outside using a ball end bit and a ball end pin on the pin router. From there I hand carved and sanded. But you could essentially do that on a high speed drill press or with a home-made pin router with a hinged arm with a router mounted in it.
I guess I just don't like to suffer to be poor...I build instruments for a living and I want to do it well, but efficiently. Hell, Stradivarius's shop cranked out a fiddle a week... Are violins harder or easier than F style mandos?
By Mario's reconning here, an A mando is equal to a guitar. But an F is equal to four or five guitars. That means that the scroll and points cost three or four guitars. That's just nuts. Where's the value in those vestigal parts? And why then doesn't an A-5 cost about 1/3 of an F-5? (1/4 to 1/5 the labor, close to same on parts). Or do they? Do you all lose your butts on F's and make money on A's?
I'm not just a luthier; I'm also a business man. I have a production shop with seven employees. I keep track of the money that goes into building these things; I have Bills of Materials with every screw and drop of glue accounted for. I try to track the time as well as I can. This stuff is important whether you work in a big factory like Joe does at Gibson or work in your garage. I would say that some of you probably have no retirement plans, and at the rate you build instruments, you won't be able to afford to retire or support yourselves when you can't work any more. What I see here is not a recipe for a happy old age for luthiers. You need to get my forthcoming book to be titled, "Marrying Well for Luthiers."
Rick, I'm currently building an octave thats the reduced L-5 design. While there's more to carve because of the increased size, it's basically pretty simple compared to an F-5. Seems easier than an A because there were no tight bends to make like at the neck joint area and you don't even have that pesky heel button to bind. This one doesn't have the bound F-holes or a cutaway but I've been there and done that. It's still apples and oranges.
Could someone define the apples and oranges? I'm trying to read between the lines here, and I think I'm seeing that some folks spend nearly two hundred hours extra on a mandolin because it's got a scroll on the body and a scroll on the peghead. Is that right? At a low-ball shop rate of fifty bucks an hour, that's a ten grand couple of pieces of nothing but sculpture, right? And if you're not working in a real shop at fifty bucks an hour or a garage shop at thirty, then you did marry well! Around here, finish carpenters get twenty to thirty bucks an hour...and that's with no shop to support.
Hobby vs carreer.
Pro builders simply cant afford to spend 400 hours on a mando.
I appreciate that there's a bigger market for mandos in the US than here in the UK, but I've seen guitars hanging in shops at $5,000 but never a mando at over $1000.
if it's your hobby, you can take all the time in the world.
It's my hobby and it's really cool if someone pays me for a guitar or mando I've made which will cover the parts for one (or maybe two) down the line, but as for earning enough to quit the day job, pay for premises, take a salary and fund a pension?
no chance.
but I do enjoy the hobby!!!
hey!! I got my own Syndrome!!!!
Sigh...
I love folks that tell me how long it should take me to do something...
So glad you also know and are concerned about my retirement plan. #
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