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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…
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How I build banjos, step by step
I spend a fair amount of time on the forums at BanjoHangout.org and have enjoyed reading some journals of other people’s banjo builds there. I figured I would put together one of my own in the hope that it might be interesting or helpful to someone. I’m posting it both on BHO and hoytbanjos.com. BHO has…
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My first banjo uke
This was a custom build around a 9-1/8″ metal clad pot that I had bought a couple of years ago from someone. I put a new calfskin head on it from Smakula Fretted Instruments. I had never mounted a skin head but it was not as hard as I had feared. The combination of animal…
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Back from my trip
I had a very good trip this year, and if anyone is interested I wrote a trip report on the Adirondack forum, and there is a link from there to pictures I took. The short version of the story is that I rode a bicycle to Indian Lake while pulling a canoe on a trailer and…
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Gone August 14-20
I will be taking my annual vacation, bicycle camping in the Adirondacks from August 14-20. I will be out of reach of email during that time but will respond to all messages by the end of the 21st. I’m sorry to be out of reach if you are trying to contact me.
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Learning to do inlay
I have shied away from learning to inlay things into instruments but I finally gave it a try and found that it was not as hard as I had feared it would be. A customer particularly wanted some inlays in a neck I was making for him, so he sent me the pieces he wanted…