"The Snooks" Continued

I've gotten quite a bit of interest in my gourd banjo project so I thought I would update everyone on my progress. Since my last post I have shaped the heel of the neck and added the dowel stick. With the dowel in place I was able to attach the neck to the gourd. This step is really a difficult one, more so then it probably appears. The difficulty lies in getting the angle of neck to the head at the proper angle so the action will be good. After trying several methods to line in up right, I finally decided that I would just have to make an educated guess and hope it works! I believe what I have now will work, but I won't know for sure until the head, fretboard and strings are installed.




There is still quite a bit of work to go on this but I will try to keep up with the pictures and progress reports as I go along.

I got into a conversation with a fella that attends the same jam session as I do about gourd banjos this last week. He wants to build one himself because he can't see paying $600+ for a pre-made one, the more I work on this thing, the more I realize why builders charge that much for one! I predict that he will think the same thing once he gets into his project as well!

I commend anyone who undertakes the task of building a musical instrument as it isn't as easy as it can seem from posts like this. My hope is that these post will help him and others who are interested in building such an animal.