Several years ago I built a musical instrument called a bouzouki. It is built as an “octave mandolin” such as it is one octave deeper than a mandolin is typically tuned.

My niece’s husband had commented on my teardrop mandolin I had built a few years earlier. He said he’d like one if I got around to it again. Well I didn’t, but sort of, this is the result.

Any of the following images can be clicked on to show larger versions.

Detail of the front shows how I tried to match the wooden rosette with the perfling.

The rosette was wood, which I painted with multiple layers of gloss spray paints. I sprayed a little green, blue, silver, white, etc. over and over again as they mixed together to form a complex look of abalone-like sheen.

The back was plain, so I decided to add a center line to look like it was a split back. It is not split, but I thought it looked better.

The entire instrument received 20 coats of sprayed on lacquer. I buffed them every 3-4 coats to make is smooth. Ultimately polished it to 2,000 wet coat sand paper. Then buffed it with piano polish to a mirror finish.

I’m pretty proud of this instrument as it sounded terrific, it also looked pretty good too.

The symbol on the head of the instrument is a combination of my initials JAS. Something I’ve done since I was in middle school, in the style of Albrecht Durer.