The Little Roosky

This mandolin was sent down to me by the good Boberdz, who found it in the trunk of a rental car. It's got some labels stuck inside but I couldn't tell you what they say as they're in Russian. It had been wallpapered on the back and sides by those crazy Rooskies with some kind of woodgrained contact paper and had that red peacock design painted on the front....I picked out this little tune {Farther Along mp3} on it before I dismantled the poor thing.

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...so after a few dozen sheets of sand paper, the bird and that contact paper finally was gone and guess what? There was really some pretty nice wood down under all that! Not the best wood, probably, but this mandolin player is not the best so I guess me an it are starting off on equal ground more or less..

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Once you get something sanded naked, you're faced with the problem of deciding what to do that'll look better than what you started off with. Now, since it had that woodgrained wallpaper pasted on it, you'd guess that I would be able to do better than that, but you'd be wrong. I got some nitrocellulose toner in a spray can and figured,"..this'll do ...just to tone it down a little bit..." But since I got in a bigass hurry and didn't test the color on something first, I went ahead and sprayed the most awful looking solid brown primer-like color on it. Awful really ain't the word for it. And I started back with the sand paper again....
This time I went down to Regal Paints (who have a great selection of nitrocellulose lacquers, stains, varnish and even house paint) and got the reddest red stain I could find and the pics below are what it turned out as. Not as red as I thought, but Russia ain't so red anymore either.

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I made a new nut for it and bought a new bridge, added some better tuning keys and "Voila!", a new thing to make the dog hide and family members to find something to do in another room while I figure out how to play this. Click on this last photo to hear what the new improved Mando sounds like. It's gettin' there but the player needs to do some more woodsheddin' I believe. If you look up there on the shelf above, you'll see my "studio" setup for most of these bad recordings. Pretty fancy,eh?





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