OK the curly maple has arrived! It's now time of bend the sides into the mandolin mold. The sides of an mandolin are 1 9/16 inch wide and need to be sanded down to 2.8 mm thickness. Again this is an easy task using a self feeding power sander. A measuring gauge was used to make sure we had the proper thickness.
Here's the wood used for the sides:
The next step is to soak the sides in water so that they can be hand bent using the bending iron:
This is the bending iron used to bend the sides. Yes, it's very hot!!
Here's Mark showing me how to bend the wood:
With the sides bent, here's everything in the mold. The sides required four separate pieces to complete the circumference of the body. Note the 'c' clamps and wedges keeping everything nice and tight. We'll let this dry for several days before using any glue.
The next step is to start creating the neck. Again, we're using curly maple. The neck was cutout from a solid block and required a lot of measuring and cutting on the bandsaw to get to this stage.
With the neck roughed out, we now needed to cut a channel for the truss rod. Note the extra cutout on the left side of the channel. This needs to be sized to accommodate the truss rod bolt, washer and wrench.
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