What's your Victor, Vector?

It's been awhile since I have updated the blog, I've been real busy around the shop this winter doing repairs and building new banjos. I thought I would take a minute to share one of my recent repair jobs. I got in this 1880's Dobson Victor Concert banjo that a customer had bought. It needed a bit of work to make it playable again. Somewhere in the past the headstock had broken and been re-glued rather poorly, but it was stable. It needed a new nut, some touch up to the previous repair work and the first 3 frets changed. Here are a few pictures of the original.









After replacing the frets, making a new nut, and cleaning up the old repair I strung it up and realized that the neck had pulled forward so much that the strings where about 5/8" high at the 12th fret. The action was way too high to make it playable. The solution I came up with was to make an adjustable bracket for the dowel stick to be able to lower the action with only modifying the original neck/dowel slightly. The owner didn't want to spend a lot of money and I generally prefer to modify these old instruments as little as possible, so the bracket worked out great. Here is how it turned out strung up with Nygut strings and a new bridge.





Here you can see the bracket I manufactured out of brass.



This banjo turned out great and it plays great too, the original skin head with the Nygut strings gives it a nice warm tone.