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This particular page was created 12/10/2003 and last updated 17/05/2005
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| | Mandocellos tend to be expensive and hard to come by, but it is possible to get one really cheap. You can simply buy a low-priced Irish bouzouki and restring it, or if you have some basic woodwork skills and a few hours to spare, you can do it this way: Red Henry once posted a really interesting project at the COMANDO maillist. He had bought a cheap ($15) plywood archtop guitar at a flea market and converted it to a mandocello. Just click here to have a look at it. A few details he doesn't mentionat his site: - Although Red doesn't say anything about it, you should probably reinforce the neck, if it doesn't already have a truss rod. Since you'll probably have to remove the fretboard anyway, this shouldn't mean much extra work.
- Red recommends mandolin tuners, claiming guitar tuners are too heavy and steal too much sound.
- A tenor guitar might actually be even more suitable for conversion since the neck might not need any modifications at all. Just swap the nut, tailpiece and bridge and rebuild the head to take four extra tuners.
- Although you probably could do something similar with a "standard" acoustic guitar, I really won't recommend it. The top of a mandocello has to withstand considerably more string tension than a guitar, and you can't expect a flat-top guitar to handle the extra strain.
- A project like this is suitable for low-priced guitars only. High quality archtop guitars are rare and really don't deserve a fate like this. They tend to be quite expensive too, so if you have something like a a pre-war Gibson or Epiphone but want a mandocello, you'll get a better result and probably save some money by selling the guitar and buying a Weber mandocello instead.
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