Build Your Own Hamdolin

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THE NECK

I knew that making the neck (or "hamdle") would be tricky: It'd have to be well shaped and smooth for easy playing, with frets placed accurately to produce true scales and with tuning pegs that were both inexpensive and precise.

At first, I considered using a piece of pine 2 X 4 for the neck, but decided that the wood wouldn't hold up to the pressure of eight taut steel strings. Then I spied a big old block of black walnut, about 18" square, which had been lying around for untold years. All I had to do, I assured myself, was cut away at that ponderous chunk until I'd removed everything that didn't look like a mandolin neck. No problem ... or so I thought until I took another look at my meager store of tools.

I tried using my trusty circular saw to slice the block down to size, but the blade was dull, as usual, and the cut it made was too shallow to make much difference anyhow. I resisted using my chain saw, for fear of ruining my masterpiece (or perhaps myself). The only solution, I concluded, was to resort to the subtle persuasive power of my splitting maul and wedge. I laid the walnut on my chopping block and proceeded to hack away at it, in much the same way, I fantasized, that Michelangelo started his sculptures in blocks of marble centuries ago.

Eventually, I whittled the block down to more manageable dimensions and clamped it to the sheet of plywood I call my workbench. I then rummaged around in my toolbox, extracted a hammer and a set of woodworking gouges, and—using a "real" mandolin as a guide—proceeded to chisel out the rough shape. I had to be careful to make the neck increasingly (but only slightly) wider from top to bottom ... to give it a flat fingerboard surface and a palm-pleasing rounded contour at the back . . . and to angle the peg head slightly down and away from the fretboard. So I worked slowly, taking only a few cuts at a time with the gouges before checking my progress for symmetry and general agreement with the real neck's design.

After hours of painstaking stop-and-go effort, I found myself with a huge pile of wood chips. . . and a pretty fair rough-hewn hamdolin neck. From there I pressed on, using various rasps, files, and—ultimately—sandpaper before finally declaring the piece finished. (The illustration shows the various dimensions of the resulting product.)

Next, after double-checking to be sure that the fretboard was reasonably flat, I laid out the positions of the frets by first measuring the distance from the nut (the piece the strings cross over just below the peg head) to each fret on my own mandolin. Then I used those measurements and a pencil and straightedge to mark the locations of the frets on the hamdolin neck, taking care to keep the lines square to the neck and parallel to one another.

For those of you who might not have a mandolin around to measure, here are the distances I used: Once I had the fingerboard laid out, I carefully cut across each mark with my carpenter's saw, to make shallow slots for the frets.

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