December was a good month here in the shop. I started off with a batch comprising one stock banjo and three custom banjos. The stock banjo is an 11″ mahogany, #417, and is shown on the Banjos page. #418 was a mahogany 11″ with a paddle peghead and an ebony fretboard.
#419 was a fretless 12″ walnut A scale with cherry trim, jatoba fretboard, and nylgut strings.
#420 was an 11″ cherry banjo with a tubaphone tone ring from Gold Tone, aged brass hardware, an internal resonator, walnut trim, and a jatoba fretboard. .
After the banjo batch it was time to build a mystery instrument, with a 14″ octave mandolin body, a 5+1 banjo neck configuration, and nylon guitar strings. I am not sure what the name is for a thing with a mandolin body and banjo neck. The back, sides and neck are cherry, the fretboard, tailpiece, and bridge are jatoba, and the soundboard is western red cedar that was given to me by a kind person long ago.
Last came a final batch of four banjos, starting with #421, a custom partial longneck made of cherry with walnut trim, a persimmon fretboard, zebrawood armrest, aged brass hardware and a 1/4″ round brass tone hoop.
Banjos 422-424 are all shown on the Banjos page and were built to replace similar stock banjos that were sold this fall.
January is starting off with a batch of 3 banjos, one custom and two stock. After that I am not sure what will come next, as there are some other possible custom jobs that are not yet confirmed.
2025 was a good year in the shop, and I think may be my most productive to date. Total numbers of instruments built are:
61 banjos
9 necks
5 octave mandolins
3 guitars
2 mandocellos
1 bouzouki
1 dulcimer and
1 mystery instrument.
I also made some smaller parts for people throughout the year, mainly armrests, rims, and tone rings and tension hoops. I’m very grateful to get to do this work full time now. I am also very grateful to the kind person who fixed my website for me, back in the fall, as described in the October shop news post.
I raised the base price for banjos $50 for 2026, after keeping it the same for the last two years. This is to keep up more or less with inflation. Banjos built in 2025 are still at the old price until they are sold. I also had to raise prices by $10 on the brass tone rings I make due to a sharp rise in the prices I have to pay for brass bar material now.