Repairs & Conversions

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to repair a 1930's era Vegaphone for a gentleman from South Carolina. The banjo needed a neck reset as the action was way too high. The owner plays Scruggs 3-finger style banjo and wanted a fairly low action. After removing the dowel stick, I plugged the existing hole with a hardwood dowel, re-drilled a new hole at the proper angle, rested the dowel and reworked the heel angle. After getting it all back together it set-up perfectly with a 5/8" bridge and is probably one of the sweetest sounding banjos that I have ever had the pleasure to play.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take any pictures of the banjo prior to completing my work, but I did manage to take a few shots with my phone before the owner picked it up.

Sorry to all the folks that follow my blog, I have been a bit lazy lately in keeping up with the news and happings here at Buzzard Mountain.

I wanted to take a moment and share one of my latest projects. A little while ago I got a Somerset S1 sent to me for repairs and a few upgrades. As some of you may know I worked with the Somerset team for awhile and help to build and design their banjos, I no longer work directly with the Somerset Company but I am always happy to help a customer out when in need. On the S1's I primarily made rough neck blanks and turned a few rims, then sent the parts off to another builder to finish them up.

This particular S1 had a few issues that needed to be addressed. The fingerboard was not securely glued and was starting to de-laminate, the neck angle was just a hair off from side to side, the nut was a bit too high and the finish was worn off on the back of the neck and rim. In addition to fixing those things the owner also wanted some upgrades. So I installed a new fretboard with a frailing scoop, did a new custom headstock inlay, added MOP side dots, did a heel cap inlay, added wood binding to the rim and refinished the whole banjo with a Hard Oil finish. I also thinned the neck profile to my standard size as the original was left a little thick.

Here are a few images of the finished banjo:
Front view showing the new fingerboard and MOP headstock inlay of a Celtic Trinity.


Back View shows the refinished neck and rim, and an Abalone Shamrock inlay in the heel cap.


A closer look at the heel cap.


A side view of the rim with wood binding added and re-finished.


A closer look at the headstock.


All and all, this banjo turned out looking great and it plays great too.

Once again it's been awhile since I've updated my blog, but things have been real busy this spring. I thought I would take a min. to share a recent repair job I finished. I guy that comes to a local jam session I attend, had broken his Mandolin head a few weeks ago. He took it to another repair shop and thought it was fixed, until he was playing it at the jam and it snapped again. He thought because it had been repaired before and re-broke that it was a lost cause. I looked at it and said, "I can fix it".

Here is what it looked like when it came to me:






Yikes!

This is after I disassembled it:



The break wasn't very clean and I had to scrape off the old glue from the previous repair and do my best to get a tight fit to re-glue it. After re-gluing the break, I decided that to make sure this thing would hold I needed to install a hardwood spline through the break to reinforce it. So I routed out a channel and installed a Hard Maple spline.



After sanding the surfaces and cleaning them up this is what I had:


Everything looked good so I proceeded to do the re-finish process, which consisted of staining the wood, spraying a couple wash coats of lacquer, a few coats of Translucent Black colored lacquer, and then a few finish coats of lacquer with a slight bit of vintage amber to match the color of the old lacquer. After all those coats and sanding in between them all it took was a final polish and the repaired area matched the old finish perfectly.



I strung it up and she played as well as she ever did.



I love the challenge of repairing instruments like this, it's very satisfying to have something that is broken and too return it too a playable state.

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.

I thought I would share one of my latest conversion projects. I received this old tenor banjo for a new neck, unfortunately there is not a lot of information online about the builder of it. It is labeled "Mc Cinnis Shaw Clef Club Brand" and she is a fine ol' beauty. Here are a few images of how it arrived at my shop:







It has a 12-1/6" Dia. rim with an interesting tone ring design that is similar to an archtop tone ring. Here is a picture of the rim and ring just before I replaced the head.


Here it is in its finished 5 string form. I completely made a new dowel stick for this as I believe it's best to leave the original neck intact vs. re-using the original dowel.




She plays great and should make a fine banjo for her new owner for years to come.

I recently got in a couple of old banjos into my shop for a general fix up, both of these were so interesting that I thought I would post some pictures of them.

The first one was an old Supertone banjo, nothing really special as there are hundreds of these floating around. What was interesting about this one is that someone in the past had removed the mother of pearl dots and replaced them with mother of pearl shirt buttons. This banjo just needed a set-up and neck adjustment, so I didn't do much work on it.







The next banjo is a short scale banjo, it has a scale length of 24 - 11/16". It has a skin head and violin friction peg tuners. It's a very nice little banjo and plays wonderfully. It was built by Thompson & Odell and is labeled "Artist Banjo made by Thompson & Odell Co Boston" and from my research it dates to approx. 1890's. This banjo just needed a neck adjustment and a little set-up.









I love visiting with these old banjos, it's a great opportunity to learn how they were built and designed back in the old days.

I recently finished up another neck project for a customer who had an old spunover banjo that belonged to his grandfather. This was a fun project and the neck turned out great on this old banjo. The rim had been refinished by it's owner, but the old neck was in pretty bad shape. Amazingly it was an almost Identical neck to the one that was on the old Gibson pot. These two banjos came to me from two different parts of the country, I wish I knew who made these necks!

Here are a few images of the old necks on this one and the Gibson.




Here is the new neck on this wonderful old banjo

Awhile ago I did a post about an 83 year old Gibson Tenor banjo that was sent to me for a rework. You can see the original post here.

Here is how it arrived to me:


And here is the finished banjo:




This was a fun project and I'm glad I got the chance to restore this old rim to a playable condition, hopefully the owner will have many years of enjoyment out of this one!

This 1992 Alvarez Yari came into my shop a week or so ago via a local music shop I do work for on occasion. The owner of this guitar plays really hard and it shows. The first 5 frets or so were worn nearly to the fingerboard on the first string, the nut and saddle where ground so low that every strings buzzed liked crazy and he had worn deep divots into the finger board at the first few positions. Here are a few pics of the condition it showed up in, I had already removed the first fret before I realized I should take some pictures.









After removing frets 1 through 5, I used a technique in which you score the divots with a razor blade, raise the grain with a knife and fill the holes with ebony dust and CA glue. Once this was complete I was able to sand down that portion of the fingerboard and the fix is nearly invisible, and will become less visible as it begins to wear again. After that I re-fretted the first 5 frets, leveled all of the frets and re-crowned them. Next I removed the existing nut and saddle and remade them with new bone. This raised the action a bit but not much. This guitar really needs a neck reset to restore it too proper action, but that was beyond what this owner wanted to spend. After some time setting it up this thing plays great again with no buzz even when played hard. Here are a few pictures of the finished repair.







This was a fun little project and I love to restore someones baby back to playable shape again.

There's been a lot going on around Buzzard HQ lately and today I started on a wonderful repair/restoration. I was sent this banjo and the owner really didn't know much about it, only that it has hung on his wall since the early 70's and had a Gibson tag on the inside. The banjo turns out to be an early 5 string conversion of a 1926 Gibson Tenor Banjo, this conversion was done sometime in the 60's I presume but may be earlier. The pot is stamped with a serial number 8257-30 and has a Tag that says "The Gibson, Gibson INC, Kalamazoo Mich.". A little research turned up that this pot was made in 1926 and was originally an open back tenor.

The current state of the banjo is pretty poor, the neck is bowed enough to make this banjo unplayable. So I am in the process of doing a restore on this thing, building a new neck, repairing the rim which was slightly mangled in the original conversion. The owner doesn't want a full reproduction of the original conversion or an original Gibson, he just wants a nice playable banjo. I'll post some more details and images as I progress, but for now here are some images of the banjo in the state it arrived in. The original banjo had coordinator rods if you look close you can see the holes for them.











This should be a very exciting build! I have some other repairs and new banjos going as well, and I will update the blog with other projects soon.