A few of you may know that I teach a course, "Build a Mandolin in Four Days." I first designed the instrument and the curriculum for the Telluride Bluegrass Academy, and it was a three day burn; that version is now being taught by Michael Hornick and Dan Roberts at the Rocky Grass Festival in Lyons, Colorado.
I revived it a couple of years ago for myself to teach at the Crucible www.thecrucible.org , an art school in Oakland, and also to do as a feature down at the Roberto Venn School of Lutherie in Phoenix. Down there I do two days of it, and several of the instructors who took it the first time I went down help the students finish it off.
The mando is build Spanish style on a solera, and the instrument is loosely patterned after the Gibson "Army-Navy" models of around 1917. The course starts with a joined and sanded top and back, a rough machined neck blank, and a pre-slotted fingerboard. The students bend sides and do all gluing and assembly, fret the 'boards, then finish carve the neck, sand, and string up in the white.
In my "civilian" course, nobody needs any previous woodworking experience, and nobody is expected to have aspirations to becoming a luthier, though some from my original three years at Telluride have done so. So this is really all about an intense immersion with nearly instant results...the students all leave with playable, good sounding instruments.
Here are some pics from last weekend at RV...
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