8/11/2013 - Banjo Boys - Chapter 21

Even with our absence of a few weeks, the progress has continued.  Monty discovered that the way he had designed his tension hooks wouldn't work.  He had used spoons and had bent the handle end of the spoon over, drilled and tapped it, and was using a screw to adjust the tension.  Unfortunately, several of them stripped their threads when placed under tension.  He has gone back to the drawing board on his hooks.

Monty's banjo heel

While that was happening, however, Monty decided to decorate the heel area of his banjo's neck.  He used a mother-of-pearl rose blossom that he customized to fit.  It looks terrific.

Clint has started two new banjos.  His father-in-law saw the instrument Clint had given to Sarah and expressed an interest in having one.  So Clint is building one for himself with a "bees" theme and one for his father-in-law with a cherry blossom theme using cherry for the neck.  Clint's will use a maple neck with accents in yellow wood and ebony for the yellow-and-black theme of bees.  We met two weeks ago and got the neck blank cut out of maple -- a special very curly piece of maple.  Clint also brought up the "cherry" that he had acquired on eBay.  It turned out to be walnut.  He has since acquired some beautiful cherry, so last week we got started on the cherry neck

Clint's inlay on the cherry blossom banjo is done using curly maple for the boughs and holly wood for the petals and leaves.  He plans to use inorganic dye to stain the boughs a little darker and make the leaves green.  I loaned him a scroll saw after he got started on Saturday and he didn't stop working on the inlays until he had them all cut and glued together.  Here's what they look like laid out on Sarah's banjo.

Today, Clint and I gathered at Hardee's in Meridianville for breakfast in preparation for a full day of banjo work.  Once we proceeded to the shop, we decided our highest priority was to build a wood steamer.  Clint wants to do another veneer on the underside of his peghead.  This requires that the veneer have a bend in it to accommodate the shape of the neck and peghead.  The veneer is ebony, which is incredibly brittle.  We didn't have much luck soaking the ebony on our previous experiment, so we decided to try steam.

I had an old pressure cooker and hot plate in the shop.  I also had some 4" PVC pipe.  We went to the Ace Hardware store in Hazel Green and bought the other necessary components.  I drilled some vent holes in the top of the pipe and made a "rack" out of brass rods that go across the inside diameter of the pipe.  There is a rubber hose connecting the pressure cooker to an end cap of the steamer.  Here's the finished product in use:

We looked for some cylindrical object that had approximately the same diameter as the concave curvature on the underside of the peghead.  By using such an object as a form, we thought it might be possible to clamp the steamed ebony around this object to let it "set."  After over an hour of steaming, Clint pulled the ebony out of the steamer and together we clamped it as follows:

Our observation is that the steaming is far superior to soaking for "softening" the brittle ebony.  The next steps are to test whether longer-duration steaming will make the wood even more flexible and to dtermine how much "spring back" we will observe when we unclamp the wood.

Once the steamer effort was done, we started real work on the banjos.  Clint got his fretboard of "African Blackwood" applied to the cherry neck.  Once that glue was dry, he also glued the top ebony veneer to the peghead.

My peghead pattern

I'm building another banjo with a maple neck and a conventional 2-ply maple rim.  I had started my neck two weeks ago, but neither Clint nor I had made the final decision on our peghead shape.  Clint brought full-size profiles of several traditional and non-traditional pegheads that he had printed.  We each selected the shape we wanted to use and made patterns out of medium density fiberboard (MDF).  I managed to get my ebony veneer glued to my peghead and then tack-glued my newly made MDF pattern to the ebony.  I'm now at a point where I can finish the peghead profile cuts.

Clint decided he had to try inlaying at least one of his fretboard decorations.  We set up the Dremel Mototool at the proper depth of cut in a special jig used to carve out the recessed area for an inlay.  Clint put on the magnifying binocular head set and went to work.  In short order he had the recess cut out.  We mixed up some two-part epoxy glue with powdered ebony dust and placed the inlay in its recess.  In five minutes, it was ready to sand:

The inlay doesn't look too pretty when it's first placed

After a few minutes' sanding, it began to look more like the finished product.  Clint has already ordered some special dye that he plans to use on parts of the inlay.  It should be spectacular!

More next week...