F5 STYLE MANDOLINS

The F5 style mandolin.  Whilst working for Gibson in the early 1920s, acoustic engineer and musician Lloyd Loar took some of Orville Gibson’s original ideas and optimised them, producing quantum leaps in performance and quality. He is mainly remembered for the F5 mandolin and the L5 guitar. Both instruments resulted from re-designing the soundboard. The oval soundhole was replaced by violin-style f holes and the simple transverse interior brace was replaced by two “tone bars” or longitudinal braces similar to the bass bar in a violin. The braces terminated near the neck block and splayed into the tail area, passing under the bridge feet. The fingerboard was cantilevered over the top of the soundboard like that of a violin.

This top design, plus Gibson’s scroll and point enabled the top to be graduated more like a violin. It could be uniformly thinner or graduated thinner around the whole margin as it was not having to support the fingerboard or neck stresses as much as on the simpler models. This made for a much more efficient top and back plate and a huge volume increase. In later years, this was to stand the F5 mandolin in very good stead. It was initially designed as a classical instrument. It was very expensive for its day and did not sell in huge quantities. When it was used by Bill Monroe in Bluegrass music, however, it was found that it could compete acoustically with the fiddles and 5 string banjos and Dobro steel guitars in those groups. The F5 model has become the standard for Bluegrass and related styles. There are now hundreds of makers building similar mandolins and the future of the design seems assured (as bluegrass players are probably the world’s most conservative musicians). I have recently designed a modern version of the F5 - my S model.

Gibson’s F5 was expensive for a good reason. The time required to make one of these is about double that required for an A model. There is much more carving, glueing, binding and usually inlay work in these mandolins. I don’t have many pictures of my F5s at the moment, but more detail can be seen by clicking on the picture at the top.