September was a bit unusual in that I had no custom work on hand to be done, but I had (and still have) a lot of stock instruments to catch up on restocking. Banjos 401-403 were partly made at the end of August, and completed in September, and 404-408 were made entirely in September. All 8 of these banjos are shown on the Banjos page. I am currently working on another 12″ walnut banjo with a Dobson tone ring and a drum shell rim, and a walnut octave mandolin. Some other stock banjos were bought recently so I will need to replace them too during October.
About the middle of September I decided to finally follow up on an ad I had seen from time to time on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist for several years for pallets of mahogany offcuts. They are a byproduct of a high-end door factory about 1-3/4 hours west of here, at the other end of the county. The ad specified a maximum length of 20″, so I figured the pieces would be good for headblocks and tailblocks for guitars, mandocellos, and octave mandolins. When I got there I found that they had lots of pieces that were long enough for banjo necks, and that my $100 pallet had about 55 board feet on it. I think it should be enough for quite a number of banjos, and it looks like they will keep generating more material as long as the factory stays open. I was also pleased that it was African mahogany, which is the kind I am used to using, and which is reputed to be the closest wood now easily available to the true mahogany species. Mahogany has always been an upcharge in my shop, but now it has become a base price wood for banjos and banjo parts, as the price is in the same range as what I pay for locally cut cherry and ash. It’s a pretty wood, with lots of chatoyance, and seems to me to sound good. Guitars will still cost extra for mahogany since the pieces I got in this load were not long enough to make the sides, so I will continue to use the mahogany I got from Bell Forest Products to make guitars.
Pump operator training is almost done now, with the last session tomorrow morning, and then I will only be attending local trainings for a while. That will free up some time to catch up in the shop. My sister visited from Massachusetts for the last 10 days of September and a good time was had by all. The weather was damp and rainy for four of those days, but we got out and did some hiking and paddling on the nicer days, and while we didn’t get nearly enough rain to overcome the drought it was better than nothing. As far as I know October will be a quieter month and I hope to get more caught up in the shop. My goal is to make at least 5 banjos, the octave mandolin I have just started, and maybe a fiddle or a mandocello at the end. I don’t have any instrument pictures to add to this post, but this is from our excursion on Raquette Flow, which is about half a mile from the workshop here in Piercefield. My mother is in the kayak and my sister in the canoe. I am on a paddle board, but temporarily invisible to the camera.
