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I will be away August 23-29
I am going on my annual bicycle-powered vacation to the Adirondacks from the 23rd to the 29th and will be out of reach of email and all other forms of long distance communication other than smoke signals (which I don’t know how to read, unfortunately) and yelling during that time. I will do my best
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Making an armrest for banjo #44
In January I did a series of posts detailing the construction of banjo #44, which is to be the prize in a free drawing on BanjoHangout coming soon. I got to thinking that I should make an armrest for it, so I did a little bit ago but didn’t get it posted till now. This
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An experimental 6 string banjo
I made this banjo after thinking about a number of ideas that I wanted to try. Over the course of a few weeks I came up with an idea in my head and when I had time and all of the materials I went ahead and put it together. The first idea I had was that
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Building banjo #44, part 8
I spent a couple of hours or so on getting this banjo assembled and set up. My first step was to use a single edge razor blade like a scraper and run it around on all of the finished surfaces where it will work. Then I used 400 grit sandpaper or #0000 steel wool on
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Building banjo #44, part 7
Yesterday I put the finish on Banjo #44, as well as a ukulele and a refinish job on a used banjo which is going back up for resale soon. I took a couple of pictures after the second of 5 coats of Tru Oil. I can’t use the camera while I have my gloves
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Building banjo #44, part 6
This will be a much shorter post than my recent ones. I only spent about half an hour working on the banjo tonight, and now it will have to wait till Sunday when I will have time to apply the finish. In the winter, or whenever it’s too cold to finish in an unheated space
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Building banjo #44, part 5
On the evening of the 24th I spent most of my time marking and drilling holes, and sanding. My first task was to fit the neck to the pot. I began by marking the position of the square hole where the dowel stick passes through and drilling most of the way through with a spade
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Building banjo #44, part 4
On the evening of the 24th I had a bit over 2 hours of time to spend in the shop. My first priority was to make the dowel stick and glue it into the neck mortise. I found a piece of leftover cherry that was about 1 inch square and had minimal grain runout. I
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Building banjo #44, part 3
On the 21st I got to the shop about 6 PM and worked for about three hours. My first task was to remove the clamps from the peghead and sand it flat on the disk sander. Then I traced the template onto it, ready to cut out. The template and the fret position sheet shown
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Building Banjo #44, part 2
Since I hadn’t glued the blocks into rings the night before I did it after lunch on the 20th. I have found that it saves time to apply glue to 6 blocks at a time. Then I stand them all on their non-gluey ends and start sticking them down on the piece of masking tape that