I’ve finally caught up with myself and am writing more or less contemporaneously again, so that’s a relief. March was a moderately month in the shop. By some freak of coincidence the three banjos I had on the agenda all had persimmon fretboards. Banjo #251 is a walnut 12″ fretless Ab scale with curly maple trim.

Banjo #252 is a cherry 11″ with a 26-3/16″ scale and curly maple trim.

Banjo #253 is a left handed 12″ maple banjo. Unfortunately I had a deadbeat customer for this one and I am stuck with it unless some kind left-handed person comes along and buys it, or I make a right handed neck for it. It is listed for sale on Banjo Hangout currently. I have not had a problem with a custom build for well over 100 banjos now, so overall things are going well, but I will need to think about implementing a deposit for banjos that are going to be hard to sell if the buyer backs out.

Banjos #254 through 257 are stock banjos and are shown on the Banjos page. I won’t have time to make any more stock banjos for a bit now, as I have a few custom builds lined up and will be away about half of the time working on repairing the house and building the workshop. Tomorrow I am heading up there and am planning to make the first steps in building the workshop. I need to put down some plastic with gravel over it and because the road is closed to heavy vehicles for the spring thaw I will need to bring in 4 loads of 1.5 tons of gravel each in the back of the bus. Luckily the gravel yard is only about 6 miles away.

As well as having more limited time to build banjos my customer service is going to go downhill for a while as I will only have internet access when I go into town, and I will not be able to ship banjos when I’m up there, so there may be delays of a few days. It’s going to be a little slow and bumpy for a while but in the long run I hope to be able to build banjos full time, so that both production and responsiveness should improve.