BANJO CRAZINESS

    Way back when I had my shop in New Jersey I began to learn frailing on the 5-string open back banjo.  I made several banjos during this period but the most satisfying had wooden heads.  Go figure. At that time banjo players were so locked into tradition that there was no interest shown in the kind of banjos I wanted to build.  Just being stuck with the three-ply rim, which I couldn't make in my shop, turned me off.  When I moved to Virginia I sold my banjos and that was the end of it, or so I thought.

    Early in 2007 Huss & Dalton coworker Ken McAlack contracted banjo mania, a truly infectious disease.  Ken insisted that I spend some time on banjo websites and I was immediately blown away.  The banjo scene had blown wide open while I wasn't looking.  Folks were making and selling gourd banjos, grain measure banjos, really old-style minstrel banjos, and very cool open back banjos with block rims and interchangeable wooden tone rings.  Wow!  The most exciting builder was Jason Romero, whose web pages displayed a grunch of beautiful, innovative open backs.  I had to get back into banjo building and relearn to frail.

This is Ken shaping a guitar neck.  He's the H&D Typhoid Mary of banjo mania.

    The problem is that banjo hardware is expensive, $300-400 for an open back even without a metal tone ring.  It also requires a different technology than guitar making.  A neighbor had given me some very pretty ipe lumber left over from a deck project, so I used it to make a block rim and a neck blank.  I ordered the necessary hardware from Stew-Mac.  And then I got sidetracked by a comment Ken made.  "Banjos are so damn expensive to build."  Well no, they don't have to be.  It depends on how open minded a person is.  I took it as a challenge, and as a reason to whip out a banjo quickly so that I could learn to frail once again.  And here's the little animal I came up with:

    This guy came together in a few hours out of scraps.  The rim is from a 2x4, but I covered it in rosewood just for the heck of it.  The top is a piece of 1/4" mahogany plywood that I thickness sanded to a floppy .100".  One spruce cross brace supports the bridge.  The mahogany neck is pieced together from a straight stick, and I had the maple fretboard hanging around for many years.  The gears are Grover Sta-tites and the 5th string peg is a cheapo friction style.  The string anchors are finishing nails.  The rosewood bridge came out of my junk box.  Retail on the parts (including the square tube Martin truss rod) is about $50, but since I had everything sitting around my shop for so many years I figure the cost was $0.  The frailing scoop removed all but 12 frets.  I stained the top and the top of the fingerboard black, then finished everything in Formby's Danish oil.  The fingerboard utilizes a technique that seems to relatively new.  Traditionally, banjos use a scale length between 26"-28".  Players normally tune to G or C and then capo up two frets to A or D.  I took a 25 1/2" board and cut off the first two frets, allowing me to tune to A and D without unduly stressing the neck.  This also makes for a very compact instrument.  You may see it as ugly but it's a fully functional instrument.  It is quiet, making it a perfect midnight practice banjo.  Believe me, when you are learning to play the banjo you don't want it to be too loud unless you live alone.  For a first step back into the banjo world I was pretty happy.

    When coworker Matt Eich saw saw Woodenhead #1 it came as an epiphany, and he decided to make one.  He went into the H&D shop on a Saturday, and less than 5 hours later he had his own wooden head.  Here it is:

 It's unsanded and unfinished, and that's the way he strung it up---totally within the spirit of the instrument.  Note that his neck is full length.  Matt's banjo has a lot more volume than my #1, which I attribute to the fact that it has a back.  When I put a back on #1 I'll give you a look.

Meanwhile, I moved on to woodenhead #2.  I had a block built 11" maple rim sitting around from my first stint at banjo building.  It was an eight-piece.  I cut it down the middle length-wise, shifted the seams away from each other brick-style, and glued it back together.  This much increases the strength of the rim.  I ordered a AA Sitka top, scrounged through my mandolin stock for a curly maple back.  I make neck blanks in batches, so a walnut neck was quickly whipped out from my parts bin.  Here it is:

 

 

    From past experience I knew I didn't like the look of soundholes in the tops of woodenheads, so I cut 3 holes in the sides to let the noise out.  You can see in the side view how thick the rim is.  In both woodenheads I relieved the top edge of the rim to limber up the tops a bit.  #2 has a fretboard I made up many years ago, made of strips of curly birch and English walnut.  It has 14 frets clear of the scoop.  Again, the fretboard has the first two frets cut off.  This board has a 24 5/8" scale length before trimming. I keep #1 tuned to open G and #2 tuned to double D, and the slightly greater string tension of #1 is more pleasant to play.  #2 is much louder than #1, but its not at all annoying.  The tailpiece is ebony, the gears are Grover Sta-tites again, and the 5th string peg is geared.  No more friction 5th string pegs for me. The small size of the body limits the richness of the tone, which reminds me more of a dulcimer than a guitar.  I immediately started  woodenhead #3 with a larger, lighter rim of mahogany.  Then I got sidetracked again.

    As my frailing chops came back I began to long for a normal banjo.  My woodenheads were wonderful company but I wanted to hear myself make the traditional banjo noise.  I long ago realized that I was never going to be much of a musician, but I want to have my fun.  I had the ipe banjo waiting in the wings for my attention but I wanted to work with something less exotic first.  I glued up a block rim of walnut with a bubinga tone ring, got my wood lathe out of storage, and went at it.  Here:

    It's still screwed to the lathe chuck and the inside has to be turned a bit more, but you get the picture.

    Rim making is great fun.  I started a few more before I could get on with a completed banjo.

, the completed walnut/bubinga rim in the middle with a mahogany cap), and a rim of ambrosia maple on the right with a cap of Indian rosewood/sycamore/rosewood.

 maple comes from a tree attacked by the ambrosia beetle.  As the grubs eat through the wood they leave a stain that I find exotic and attractive.  The bugs normally attack silver maple or other of the softer maple varieties.

    But then I got sidetracked again.  How many times is that so far? Is anybody counting?  I wanted a banjo pronto, without putting time into a nice finish job.  When I decided to turn rims I made up a practice rim out of 2x4 scraps to practice on.  After all, I hadn't turned anything in 10 years.  The pine rim was pretty torn up before I recovered a feel for the tools, too.  I put it aside as useless, but then dug it out again.  I drilled it for 12 hooks and sprayed it with a high-texture paint that filled in much of the roughness.  The paint was a faux sandstone, sort of a pink color, and the rim looked hideous.  Like this:

    The color is off, but you get the picture.  So I painted it a forest green.  Remember, this is all from stuff on hand.  I didn't want to spend any money on an instrument that I might have to tear down right away because it sounded so horrible.  I had a walnut neck started for woodenhead #3, which became the neck for real banjo #1.  The green paint and the natural walnut look fine together.  The fingerboard is a 25 1/2" scale, again with the first two frets amputated.  It's made of a Mexican wood called bocate.

    The extra screws in the middle picture on the right adjust the pitch and yaw of the neck.  Grover Sta-Tites again on a headstock modified just a little from  Tobias bass design.  I love the sap wood in the heel.  While putting this guy together I was reminded of an ad the Smithsonian ran for a paper airplane contest it sponsored.  The ad said "If we knew what we were going to learn we wouldn't bother with the contest."  Or something of the sort.  The pine rim should sound terrible, but in fact the instrument sounds very nice.  Not piercingly loud; the trebles are rich; and once the head was sufficiently tightened the echo-y quality went away and the flabbiness of the 4th string went away.  The 4th string is still a bit muffled, but if this were my only banjo for the rest of my life I would play it happily.  Its also very light. I call it the Green Goddess, half to be silly and half because I'm so fond of it.  With the Goddess in hand I can settle down to make the rest of the banjos I've begun. 

MUSIC

So what's the point here?  What am I after in a banjo as far as tone is concerned?  Well, any bluegrass style banjo is automatically out.  Too loud, too cutting, too heavy (often much more than a Les Paul guitar), and too complicated.  Besides, bluegrass sucks.  Bill Monroe should have been a priest or a welder or a pimp, anything other than the father of the hideous noise called bluegrass.  Bluegrass is a well-spring of Southern sentimentality, morbid lyricism, cornball humor, and poor writing.  Hardcore 'grassers lament that there are no good new bluegrass songs, but I maintain that there are no good old ones, either.  The real irony is that some of the hottest pickers in folk music play bluegrass.  But I'm educated, not from the South, and not a redneck, so they don't believe my opinion counts, anyway, and I'm happy to leave it at that.

I keep listening to banjo CDs looking for the tone I want in my banjos.  I hear it a lot, but so many variables enter the picture that its hard to say, "That's what I want" and go get it.  Or build it.  I can safely predict what I'm going to get out of my guitars, but banjos might as well be an instrument from a different planet.  Right now I'm working with 12" rims from 1/2"-5/8" thick, wooden tone rings, and Elite heads.  Changing wood species from hard to soft varieties should alter the tone somewhat.  Normal coated white heads should make the tone crisper.  Thicker rims might do the same thing.  An 11" rim should add even more crispness and brightness.  But I'm after a certain amount of plunkiness.  I love the ultra-plunky, almost smothered tone of gourd banjos with skin heads but I don't think I'd like to hear that tone tune after tune.  Some banjos sound great in one tuning but not so hot in another.  Not to mention that in frailing it makes a strong tonal difference whether one picks with the first finger or the middle finger, and also the condition of the picking nail.  The kind of simple shop accident that grinds off the top of the nail happens almost every day, and once the nail is gone your tone goes to hell and its not much fun playing.  Jeff Huss even made himself a tortoise shell fingernail that he super glued over his real nail.  It worked and sounded fine, but it had to be removed after each session to keep shop work from grinding it away like a normal nail, which proved impractical.

So what's that leave?  All I can do is make as many banjos as possible and keep changing the variables until I find what I want, but that's the fun part.  Eventually I'll gain an understanding of how the variables work and each effort should become more focused and successful.  Remember, the Green Goddess sounds OK, so its not like a string of failures is in my future.  I just need to dial in exactly what I'm looking for.  I just wish that banjo hardware wasn't so expensive.

 

What do you say---let's build a banjo.  This will happen in episodes, and maybe in the end I'll reorganize everything into a coherent process.  Or not, depends on how I feel.  Anyhow, if we don't start it'll never happen, so let's just jump in.

Hot damn, here's what I like, a new order of parts.  Not even close to all the necessary parts, but enough to get excited about.  The can of finish is a nice touch since it points toward the completion of the project, but for now we're really jumping the gun.  What we need is some wood.

OK, here's a little jig mounted in the miter slot of my crappy Sears table saw.  I stole this idea from Jeff Huss.  The stick of walnut mounted on the jig is 2" wide and 4/4 thick (about 3/4").  The first cut whacks off the end of the stick at a 67 1/2 degree angle.  It would be nice if that angle was exact, but as we'll see, its not. The stick is then flipped over and end-for-end and shoved against the stop on the lower bar of the jig.  Then cut again.  After that the stick is flipped over for every cut until you run out of wood, and then you need a new stick.  After 8 pieces are cut you have enough for one layer of the rim:

The pattern placed over the layer is for a 12" rim that's 1/2" thick, so you can see that the length of each segment depends somewhat on the rim size you choose.  I'll show you how to figure that out later, I was just in too much of a hurry to do things in proper order.  Unhappily, since we're dealing with wood, and my jig is no doubt a skosh off, and my saw is a piece of shit, the last segment won't be a perfect fit.  Like this:

It's best to glue up the first seven segments before fitting the eighth.  I like to use thick (gap filling) super glue.  But first you might as well cut the segments for all the layers.  Normal banjo rims are 3" deep, so we need four layers.  Like this:

When you glue the segments together it should be on a truly flat surface that won't adhere too strongly to the segments.  You'll also need to keep lumps of dried glue from ruining your glue-up.  I use the cast iron top of my table saw.  Old glue scrapes right off it.  A flat counter top or piece of plywood covered in wax paper will work fine.  Neatness counts!  Dried glue may prove unwilling to come off your counter top.  Liberally coat one segment end with thick super glue and sprits the end of another with accelerator and quickly push them together.  Very porous wood may suck up the glue before you can make the joint.  Walnut is borderline but usually works fine.  If in doubt soak the joints with thin super glue once the rim layer is complete.  I use a belt sander to fit the last segment to the layer.  Like this:

Gluing up the four layers takes me less than a 1/2 hour.

Note that some of the segments differ in color.  Different boards of the same wood often vary in color, but in this case I used some walnut that used to be a custom stereo cabinet.  The dark segments still have finish on them.

The completed layer should be good and strong, but the rim's real strength comes from the cleaned layers stacked and glued together with all the segment seams off center from layer to layer.  One of my layers came out with two segments different in thickness from the others---

The two front segments aren't as tall as the rest.  I have access to a thickness sander, so this is no big deal, but if you're going to use a big sanding board to clean and level the layers you'll certainly want them all the same, or as close as you can manage, 'cause even if they turn out all the same you're in for some hard work.  Here's the rig:

The layers will be glued together with Tite-bond glue, which doesn't fill gaps.  If the layers aren't clean and flat---and finish free---the joints will be poor and the job will look ugly

 

 

MORE TO COME.  HANG IN THERE

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