The Shop > Wood & Stuff
Banjo Build
vtsteam:
Wish you were closer Simon. I could give you some hard and soft maple, cherry, black and yellow birch, beech, ash, basswood (lime), red oak, or white pine for your banjo, since they all grow here. I imagine shipping is prohibitive. Most hardwoods are about 4 pounds (2 kg) a board foot (300x300x25 mm).
S. Heslop:
--- Quote from: vtsteam on June 02, 2015, 10:47:15 AM ---Wish you were closer Simon. I could give you some hard and soft maple, cherry, black and yellow birch, beech, ash, basswood (lime), red oak, or white pine for your banjo, since they all grow here. I imagine shipping is prohibitive. Most hardwoods are about 4 pounds (2 kg) a board foot (300x300x25 mm).
--- End quote ---
From what I read online, Canada seems to be wood paradise. I don't think there's enough people interested in woodworking over here for many places to stock non construction lumber.
Started on the truss rod. I'm going for this style of rod since it seemed easiest to make.
6x12 brass was cut off.
And filed close enough to square.
And drilled. I got it square by just butting it against the drill bit in the vise. This vise is terrible and came with one of those things that're supposed to turn your hand drill into a drill press, which I got on offer to make a tapping stand out of. I was deathly afraid of breaking taps at one point since you hear alot of stories, but it's something i've yet to suffer. Anyways I keep thinking I should get a better drill press vise some day, but I also keep telling myself that a milling machine (that i'm totally definitely going to get some day) would make it redundant.
And that's them finished. I had to tap from both ends since my tap was just barely too short, but left enough of a faint tap to get it lined up from the other side. One block has a 4mm hole and i'll secure the rod with a couple of nuts most likely. The real truss rods use a left hand thread to get the thing together, but I don't have any left hand taps or dies.
And now i'm back to having nothing to do. I guess I might start figuring out how i'm going to make the tailpiece. I've made simple ones in the past but for this I thought i'd try something a bit more fancy.
S. Heslop:
I just remembered while riding the bus that I have a piece of a (what I assume to be) walnut counter top, about 22mm thick. I can laminate the neck using that. I've got some sort of lung infection though so the last thing I should be doing is breathing sawdust, even with a mask some gets through.
The walnut and meranti look kinda similar though, so it's gonna be a silly looking neck, but I can live with that.
I'm also reading up on making rasps so if I get the neck laminated before starting that it'll give the wood time to stabilize.
S. Heslop:
Split boards and tidied them up.
At 52mm it's about wide enough for a neck, but will need some extending at the peghead end, also there's some gaps and the jointing isn't perfect since my jointer sucks. It's not glued yet.
S. Heslop:
Got the neck blank glued and trued. Took me a while since i'm still recovering from that lung infection.
Jesus Christ I shouldn't be wearing this shirt on film.
I'd spent a while fiddling with that thicknesser/ planer to get it cutting a bit better. Tightening up the chain in the depth adjustment thing fixed the wobbly surface it was producing. The two surfaces on the jointer part are both fairly heavily dished, and i'd probably need to scrape them to get them flat. But despite them being crooked and all over the place they seem to cut a reasonably flat surface.
Wish i'd bothered to fiddle with the thing before cutting the boards to glue together though. There's hellacious gaps all over as a result. I'm hoping there's less gaps in the middle, as that'll be on the bottom of the neck. This top surface is gonna be covered by a fingerboard anyways, as well as routed out for a truss rod.
The whole neck skew thing has been confusing me but I think i've figured it out. From what i've read, you want to build the neck like an ordinary neck with the neck center line going through the middle of the peghead at the top. Then you mount it at an angle so that the third string goes through the center line of the banjo. Or something. I figure that means you want to put the truss rod through the neck center line rather than the 'true' centerline (the path of the third string).
I think what makes it hard to understand is that it's hard for people to explain without it sounding like a load of garbage like the above paragraph.
The truss rod doesn't leave alot of material in the top of the neck though. There's about 3.5mm from the corner of the truss rod channel to the edge of the neck. There's also going to be more material removed since i'm going for a tunneled 5th string. I might maybe make the neck a bit chunkier.
I watched a bunch of Czech Pat a Mat cartoons while 'off sick'. They never got broadcast in the UK, which is a shame, because they're really good!
t=49m57s
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