All Done!!

Finally found some time to finish off the banjo! Decided to finish the neck with Tung Oil (I used Behr Scandinavian Oil, which is at the Home Depot) which I had used on a couple furniture projects I had done, and it looks great! The nice thing with Tung Oil is you can put a coat on every hour and then dry overnight. I put about 5 coats on the neck.

I was going to get a piece of leather from a friend for the tail piece and then saw a few photos of a banjo with a simple wooden one with a hole cut it in to fit around the dowel. Since I am very impatient I figured this wood do, and I actually love the way it looks!

I am using Aquilla Nylgut strings, and first tuned it to normal G tuning, but the head was sagging a bit so I lowered the tuning to about F. I think any lower than this the strings get too flabby (its a short scale 24"). I found that the sound really cam alive after I lowered it, I think the gourds like the lower frequencies. It just became better all of a sudden!

The nut is made of walnut, because I had lots of scrap sitting around the shop after making a cutting board out of it.

Overall it was a great project, and even for a beginner like me only took a few days to make! I am praying the neck stays stable!

Bridge Over Troubled Water...

This was my first attempt to make a bridge, because lets face it, modern bridges on these gourd and minstrel banjos just look silly. This one looks definitely.....well, er, handmade. This just cements my need for a drill press!!

What I did was find a neat photo of a bridge taken straight on, and resize it in photoshop until it was just the right size. You can also to this for peg head designs. Bernunzio has great photos of their vintage instruments, and usually one of each headstock. Great place to start designing headstocks!

So back to the bridge captain.....I took the printout and cut it out and just used some spray adhesive to stick it to a scrap piece of maple. Then I just roughed it out on the bandsaw (I also used the bandsaw to carefully cut the slots for the strings, the photo was great for a visual reference!) and shaped it on the sander. If your super cheap like me, you can get a 10" sanding disc and throw it into you table saw. Works great!

To make the arches I should have used a drill press to get them precise, but I still don't own one, so I did a very rough job with my hand drill. That makes the top of the arches, and you make a couple of straight cuts back on the bandsaw to release the waste.

DONE!

Big lesson though......custom bridges are definitely worth the $20 they go for! ;-)

Get Reamed Out....and like it!

The other item I had been waiting for in the Elderly package was a peg reamer, and some fiddle pegs to use as tuners. The reamer was most expensive item in making the whole banjo, but hey its a tool so "....its a good investment...." (feel free to use this excuse on your wife if you need to).

This was pretty easy after attaching the head. Drill some pilot holes a tad smaller then the fiddle peg, and then ream out until the peg sticks through to the other side as far as you would like it. I found it helpful to use a scrap piece I had lying in the shop, and once I had the peg as far as I wanted it, marked the reamer with some tape, to know the exact depth to ream each hole.

I don't have a drill press (yet), but i used a drill guide to make sure the holes were square to the peg head.

I was surprised the fiddle pegs had no holes in them.....so use a 1/16th inch drill bit and make some more holes while you are at it.

Not painful at all!

Getting - A - Head

Okay I received my package from Elderly containing pretty well everything I need to finish off the banjo.

Decide to go right for the thing I am dreading the worst - attaching the skin to the gourd (**gasp**)

Went out and got some plain upholstery tacks, and read and re-read David Hyatts gourd banjo manual to get in my mind how I am going to tackle this.

First things first I fill up my trusty plastic recycling container with some water and soak the goat skin (I could have gotten calfskin I guess, but this was cheaper). It takes a few minutes to get pliable, and then I am ready to rock and roll.

Basically get the top coated with some glue, and wipe the excess water off the skin. Then place the skin roughly where you want it, and push in one tack. This will be your 12 o'clock starting position. Pull the skin as tight as you can in the 6 o'clock direction, and pull it is as tight as you think you can, but not hard enough to crack the gourd. Place in another tack. Then repeat at 3 and 6 o'clock.

Start going around clockwise from 12 o'clock, and pulling and pushing in tacks. If you get to the tacks you already put in and the skin is bunching up around it, stop and tack the tack out and re-tack it. Keep going until you get back to 12 o'clock.

At this point trim off the excess skin with a razor blade. I didn't have one handy so I used my utility knife. Don't do this. I thought it would be sharp enough, but I made a mess of head. Nothing to major, but definitely not as precise as I would have liked!

Okay go ahead and let the skin dry for 24 hours. Don't touch it or tap it, or play in like a bongo, no matter how tempting, because you stretch the hell out of it! This definitely was the hardest part for me ;-)

Fitting the Neck to the Gourd

After I shaped the neck the way I wanted it (take your time!) then it is time cut holes in the gourd to accept the dowel stick.

This turned out to be easier than I thought:

1. Measure the distance from the fretboard to the top of the dowel stick
2. Measure the distance from the fretboard to the bottom of the dowel stick
3. Measure width of dowel
4. Carefully transfer those dimensions to the gourd with pencil
5. Eyeball it to make sure you didn't mess it up
6. Cut away!

To cut the square hole into the gourd I used the biggest drill bit I had to gain access to the centre, then used a coping saw to carfully remove the bulk of the waste and then used a file to square up the hole. Keep testing the fit, and be sure not to make it too loose.

Next comes the exit hole on the opposite side of the gourd. David Hyatt (see links) had some great detailed instructions for measuring the angle and get getting a precise hole to leave room for a bridge. I choose to just eyeball it, since I am going to make a bridge, and I can adjust the height of it to fit the gourd.

So basically you want the exit hole to be slightly higher then the entrance hole, which allows the gourd head to slope downward from the fretboard, so that the strings stay close to the fretboard even though you have a bridge. Okay this is hard to explain! You only need a small angle because you don't want the bridge to be too high.

After that I keep fitting the dowel all the way through so that it was tight, but not too hard to remove. I then shaped the heel of the neck to fit the gourd a little snugger (?). I don't have a curved chisel, which would have come in very handy here (i'll buy one for the next banjer...).

I discovered very quickly that without proper tools, and with a one piece dowel stick it was next to impossible to get it to fit super tight to the gourd. I got it "good enough" and then left it alone.

Now it actually looks like a banjo, and my 4 year old son asks "can I play it now?". Getting there, but the next step is the one I am dreading the most....attaching the skin to the gourd!

Smoothing the Neck

Once I was able to get the neck sort of the way I wanted it (I didn't use guides or a caliper....just eye balled it, and pretended to play it every so often so I could see if the feel was okay) it was time to smooth it out.

Basically you switch from the rasp to the file, and start taking more roundish sort of motions in your stroke. Make sure to get all the marks left at this stage, as they are much harder to remove with sandpaper later! You'll need a half round file to get into all the little curvy bits.....

I also used the file to round the hand stop, which I just did by eye from the way my tenor banjo looks. I was pretty pleased with how it turned out!

After you get the rasp marks out with the file, then switch to sandpaper (I used grits 60, 120, 220 and then 400). It should be silky smooth by this point, and ready for finishing!

I have to take a break and wait for the fiddle pegs to arrive and also the peg reamer. In the meantime I will fit the the neck to the gourd.

Carving the Neck

I was in busy bee tools and picked up a rasp and a file on sale......$2.00 each! Bonus.

I also found great clip on YouTube, about carving guitar necks, which is pretty well the same except for the 5th string peg on one side.

The basic principle is that you draw your centre line down the back of the neck, and draw a another line on each side in the centre between the edge and the centre line. Basically dividing the back of the neck into quarters. Then just make flat edges between the lines and then gradually round over after that.

Click on the photos above to get a larger photo to see what I am talking about a bit more.

The rasp took off the wood pretty quick, so you do have to be cautious, but don't worry too much you can fix it up later in the process. This probably took about an hour to get it to this point. Which was a lot quicker than I thought it would be! Starting to look a little less like kindling!

Roughing out the neck blank

After I got the neck blank planed down on one side, I was able to trace a rough idea of what I wanted the banjo to look like on it. I should have squared the blank up on all four sides, because is has a bit of a lean to it after I rough it out on the bandsaw.

I only have a little benchtop model, which is not ideal, but I am definately am not able to convince my wife to let me buy anything bigger, until I make a few banjos that look something a little better than kindling. I went out and bought a 3/8" blade (the max with for this model) and it managed to hadle the maple pretty well, although it was definately chugging. It was NOT accurate at all, so I made sure to stay well outside of the line, and work it closer later with a rasp and file.

I choose a 24" scale (thats the distace from the bridge to the nut). My blank is only 30" long so this scale length is short enough to let me squeeze it on, and have enough room for a dowel stick and headstock. I choose to make a one piece dowel stick insted the more common 2 piece joined with a mortise and tenon, because I thought I would be easier. Big mistake! More on that later....

First Banjo.....

I've been playing the banjo for about 12 years, so naturally with no woodworking experience whatsoever, I decide to build one! Thank goodness for the internet and the endless supply of information available. I also was able to borrow a copy of Firefox 3 from a friend (thanks Jim!) which answered a lot of questions.

Decided I would try to build a tackhead, but was thinking maybe I should build a gourd banjo first, after bidding (and actually winning) a few gourds for cheap on Ebay. First off, those buggers are hard to cut the tops off of, and once you do, the smell will make you wished you hadn't.

I was also lucky to find some neck blanks at the local Lee Valley in a discount bin. They were about 2 3/4 inch square of regular maple for $10-15 each. Quartersawn too! What a bonus.

Went out and bought a handplane, and took a little break to figure out how to use it, and sharpen the heck out of the blade. (Here is the best info I ran across was using sandpaper to get your plane Scary Sharp)

The photo above is of the neck after cleaning up one side. It's pretty darned flat and really doesn't need to be sanding, because if your blade is sharp, it leaves the surface like glass.