Posted on June 30, 2024May 14, 2025 by Dale Phillips Aluminum Sonatas: A Brief History of Aluminum Stringed Instruments in the Last 120 Years Aluminum Sonatas: A Brief History of Aluminum Stringed Instruments in the Last 120 Years by James Condino Originally published in American Lutherie #89, 2007 Over the last two decades I have had the fortunate circumstances to be able to spend my winters in the shop building instruments and my summers outside playing in some of the world’s great rivers and mountain ranges. In preparation for my second 300-mile river trip through the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, we made plans to include a five-piece band. I searched for a 3/4-sized standup bass that would resonate through the halls of Redwall Cavern and yet withstand the carnage of Lava Falls and the river’s other huge rapids. After a lot of searching, I discovered that during the early part of the 20th century, several different manufacturers found fame in pursuit of making incredible string instruments of aluminum, and then faded into obscurity. The Paris world trade show of 1855 unveiled the first public display of a pure aluminum ingot. Within a decade the means to cheaply extract the pure metal by electricity had resulted in wide availability of aluminum and generated great interest in its potential uses. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 3 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on June 30, 2024May 14, 2025 by Dale Phillips “Cricket”: A Reclaimed Salvage Recovery “Cricket”: A Reclaimed Salvage Recovery by James Condino Originally published in American Lutherie #90, 2007 A good friend of mine outside of Bend, Oregon has a wonderful old wood shop that has been in production since the 1940s, outliving several owners. The place is full of fantastic old machinery from the last hundred years. Big chrome badges with names like Walker Turner, Crescent, and Oliver are everywhere. Dusty billets and half logs of claro walnut, bigleaf maple, and figured myrtle, stacked decades ago, lie piled up in the back. Favored ebony and true Honduras mahogany boards are stashed in the ceiling rafters. The building itself has signs of constant evolution — false roofs, sealed-off rooms, and hidden treasures everywhere. Every few years, Doug calls me over to help knock out a wall or some similar project in the constant evolution of his floor plan. That is when I discover hidden gems from seventy years ago when Bend was a tiny little cowboy town that nobody had ever heard of. Old-growth Douglas fir trees covered the Cascades surrounding the high desert in such abundance that even your shop and garage were built from fine timbers: 30–40 even lines per inch, quartersawn, no runout, perfectly clear. After three quarters of a century seasoning in the arid climate, the stuff rings like a church bell when you tap it and splinters like fiberglass when you break it against the grain. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 3 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on June 30, 2024May 14, 2025 by Dale Phillips The MacRostie Mandolin Deflection Jig The MacRostie Mandolin Deflection Jig by Don MacRostie from his 2004 GAL Convention workshop Originally published in American Lutherie #94, 2008 The mandolin world is small enough that if you’re even thinking about building one, you probably already know who Don MacRostie is. Don is an inventor, and he’s done more for Stewart-MacDonald than we will ever hear about. He’s been making Red Diamond mandolins for two decades now. At the 2004 GAL Convention Don discussed one of his research tools and told us how he applies it to his construction process to make the sound of his finished instruments more consistent and predictable. — John Calkin At the GAL Convention in 2001, Charles Fox floated the idea of teaching a mandolin building class at his American School of Lutherie. As a result, I taught a two week class, building A-style mandolins from scratch. The only thing we started with was thickly precarved oversize tops and backs. Everything else we made totally from scratch. It was a great experience. Peggy Stuart, a student in the class, documented the experience in a series of American Lutherie articles (AL#75–AL#79). Tim Olsen asked me to demonstrate and explain the plate-deflection machine we used in the class at this convention, so that’s why we’re all here. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 3 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on June 13, 2024May 14, 2025 by Dale Phillips Solving the Maple Problem Solving the Maple Problem by Rolfe Gerhardt Originally published in Guild of American Luthiers Quarterly 6, #2, 1978 Finding a good and consistent supplier of find fiddleback (or of other kinds) of maple has been one of the greatest problems in my mandolin building. The solution to the problem was the country’s best gunstock suppliers — Kenneth E. Thompson of Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. I used to buy the prohibitively expensive imported violin wood for backs, but even the most expensive pieces just did not seem right to me in terms of character or figure. And finding pieces large enough to make necks out of was something altogether else. I started buying maple muzzleloading gunstock blanks, the “tiger-striped” ones as they call them. They were good wood; they had to be for these custom guns, and they had to be dried just right for a gunstock where warp is as critical as in a musical instrument. I started checking the sources of these gunstocks, and after several months worked my way back to Ken. That was four years ago, and one heck of a lot of wood ago. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on June 6, 2024May 28, 2025 by Dale Phillips Questions: Where to Get Mandola Plans Questions: Where to Get Mandola Plans by Don MacRostie and Jim Hoover Originally published in American Lutherie #77, 2004 Don MacRostie of Athens (aka Stew-Mac), Ohio responds to Thierry, Bernus Turner, and other's questions regarding where to get a mandola plan. Although I don't know of a plan for a carved-top mandola, the following figures taken from a signed ``Loar'' mandola and a teen's H-1 serial# 75585 should be helpful in proportioning your own from a plan like the F-5 plan from Stew-Mac or GAL Plan #26. Archings on these two instruments were very much like the companion mandolins, and plate thicknesses were essentially the same as for the mandolin. The H-1 had two transverse braces on the top, with the rear brace under the bridge. The Loar was tone-bar braced. The one slightly unusual point on the Loar mandola is that the peghead and the body scrolls were not scaled up with the rest of the instrument. They were basically the same size and shape as those details on the mandolin. The book, The Mandolin Manual: The Art, Craft, and Science of the Mandolin and Mandola by John Troughton is available from Elderly Instruments (www.elderly.com/books/items/542-62.htm). Also, AL#51, Questions column gives some useful information and dimensions. Several websites offer plans for flattop mandolas, though I have not actually seen them: www.touchstonetonewoods.co.uk/ttwp2.html secure.mimf.com/order.htm www.art-robb.co.uk/plans.html Jim Hoover of New Holland, PA adds: The book Making Stringed Instruments — A Workshop Guide, by George Buchanan (Sterling Publishing) has a clean, scale drawing of a flat-top mandola as well as drawings of six other instruments, including violin, viola, cello, mandolin, and classical and archtop guitars with step-by-step do’s and don’ts.
