After my post about making the oilcan guitar, here is another build thread of one of my upcycling instruments!
It is a Mandolin, made from an Ikea cookie tin, a mahogany neck, purpleheart fretboard and using forks as a tailpiece. It's also the first ever Mandolin that I made and I've been learning by making mistakes this time as you will see further down...
I will also post a video of how the Mandolin sounds soon, in the meantime I hope you enjoy the pictures :)
(Edit: the video is here: https://d.tube/#!/v/dose-instruments/2d4uyq53)
The mahogany neck roughly cut in shape and fit into the cookie tin
For the mandolin, I've tried cutting the f-holes on the CNC. It worked out well in the end, but I broke a router bit in the process and the tin is a bit too hard for the router bits in general. That's why I cut the holes using a Dremel now.
Cut the frets on the CNC and glued on the fretboard:
The purpleheart looked really beautiful in the sunlight, I loved the gold&purple combination :)
Fretwork...
After bending the forks and installing the tuners I put strings on the Mandolin and realised my HUGE mistake - Mandolins DO need trussrods!!!! I had never really played one before and just looked at one shortly in a shop before I started making it. I didn't see the trussrod then because it was probably reached through the soundhole and not on the head, so i figured the string tension is not that high and Mandolins don't need trussrods... but of course the string tension on Mandolins is VERY high, so the neck bent like crazy when I put on strings for the first time...
So I had to take it all apart again and put in a trussrod from the back of the neck, leaving me with an actually nice looking beech skunk stripe :P
And thankfully, it all worked out in the end, leaving me with a nice looking cookie tin Mandolin that I really love and am playing a lot now :)