I'm pretty happy with my electric mandolin: it gives a clean sound, doesn't feed back, and is easy to run through pedals. A family friend had an electric ukulele they weren't using, and I had a go at converting it to an electric mandola:
I think it's a RISA tenor uke, and initially it had a pretty bad hum. Testing with a multimeter, some of the components had pretty good ground connectivity:
But not the output jack:
I took off the pickguard plate to get at the electronics:
After resoldering the jack the noise level was not perfect but a lot better.
The next problem was strings: no one seems to sell ball-end mandola strings. After a bunch of looking I decided to order four sizes of individual strings from JustStrings:
I needed to slightly widen the nut for the G and C strings, but they work well! After tweaking the action a bunch, here's what it sounds like:
It's a lot of fun, but I'm not sure I like it enough to bring to gigs. The main problem is that it's a bit too low for inversions, which my mandolin style is very dependent on. They don't sound terrible, but they're a big muddier than I'd like. I'll keep playing with it; we'll see!