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I have been bitten by the Banjo Building Bug a bit earlier this year. It is only December, and the temperature this morning was 13 degrees, so there is no going out to the shop to cut wood. However I can plan and dream.
If you have not been to my web pages before you may not know that I occasionally build a banjo and publish all the gory details of the process here. I have done this before a few times now. If you want to see how I built my other banjos, go to my web page, http://www.thekimerers.net/brian/index.shtml and click on the appropriate link.
In this case, I am going to build another gourd banjo from scratch. This is the third gourd banjo that I have built, hence the name of the page "Gourd Banjo III". I have a very special gourd for this banjo. It is huge. I measured the size of the hole once I cut the top off it and it measures nearly 14 inches across. This one is going to be a real boomer! More of that later; back to the introduction.
My workshop is just a bench stuck in the corner of my unheated garage, so my banjo work is seasonal. I work outside on my patio or in the garage during the warm months. I will not be going out to the garage in December (or January or February... or March for that matter) to work on a banjo. So I am getting everything ready early so I can jump right in when Spring gets here.
I enjoy working the wood by hand, so I only use hand tools. I have no space for lots of power tools anyway. My only power tool is my electric drill.
I always shoot the photos and write the text as I work. My goal is to chronicle what I really have to do in order to build my banjo. I have not skipped over the hard parts to make it look easier than it really was. The web page was not planned out in advance. My mistakes are here as well as my successes.
Anyway, without further ado, click on [Next] to see how I built this banjo, or click on an entry below if you know which page you want to go to.
Original post date December 13, 2008