Ten down to Nine!

If you've read my review you'd know that even though both of my mando guitars were working after a fashion I certainy wasn't satisfied with them as they stood.
This evening I took the plunge and removed all the strings from both mando guitars, ( all 24 of them!) removed the home made bridge and screwed the nice fully adjustable Gotoh bridge back on to number one mando and once restrung with the original strings (amazingly no breakages!) with very little adjusting it returned back to it’s original chimey sparkly self. It now has a super low action and no buzz, a delight to play! I only had it for a year before I stripped it down so five years later it feels like I’ve got a new instrument! So why didn’t I do this a few years ago? I guess after all that work I didn’t want to admit defeat. I might yet swap the pickups as I seem to have lost that glassy Strat like sound in favour of more emphasis in the mid range but I ‘ll give it some time (but NOT 5 years!) and have yet to try it though my Vox amp. Belive it or not the single coil pickups in my good mando are an old Demarzio super distion humbucker which I split in half, I stuck tiny magnets to the bottom of each pole peice to replace the shared bar magnet! Sounds good so far but I need to try it out on other amps and DI it. It used to sound great through an over driven amp! So what to do with Bluey!? At the very least I have two spare pick ups and 12 mini tuners! I might sort out the neck and use it to make a cigar box mando. Maybe if I made a longer scale “through” neck and slotted it through a routed a channel in the body it would bypass the lack of resonance that body has. I’m thinking it might make a nice lap steel guitar or some kind of electric dulcimer anyway no hurry!