Mandolin Making Blog back online

Since I was working on a couple other blogs and I had apparently exceeded my storage space, a couple months ago I took this blog off-line. Since then, a surprising number of folks have contacted me asking "Where did it go??". I didn't realize people were still using it. Fortunately I had saved a copy of it off-line, so I've re-posted it, in a slightly different format since I had to copy/paste each post and picture. If you see a date in the body text of a post, that's the original post date. I've added a few comments to some posts, which will typically look like this at the bottom of a post- **EDIT: Somethingsomethingsomething. - Darren Kern, 7/28/06
This is to point out what I feel to be glaring newbie mistakes that I didn't know about when I first published this blog. I'm sure there are more, and I may go back through and comment on some more posts when I get time, since I'm an expert (hahahaha!) now that I'm close to completing 3 more mandolins since this one ;-)

All kidding aside, it has been fun to go back and re-post this, because I do feel that I have learned a lot since then, which is very encouraging. Thanks to all the aspiring builders that have written me to tell me how much of a help this blog has been. I hope it continues to be a useful resource for some folks. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, need any help, or just want to tell me about your build. I'm having more fun learning to build than I ever imagined I would, and I hope you will too!
Darren