Buzzard Mountain Blog

Some news from the Buzzard Mountain HQ

Well I'm back from my adventures at Clifftop 2010, I had a really great time. I met a lot of great people, saw some old friends and had more then a few great jam sessions. I had a ton of people stop by my booth and admire my banjos and pick a bit, it was truly a great time.

Here are a couple of pics of my booth set up, with some fellers hanging around playing some.

Here's a video of Jimmy Costa playing Old Mother Flanagan on my Chestnut banjo.

I've also spent some time these last couple of weeks updating my website, trying to make it easier to navigate and too get all my latest builds shown with plenty of images and sound files. I still have a little bit of work to to do, but I think its much better then it was before!

Take care everyone.

Clifftop here I come!

I'll be leaving for Clifftop (Appalachian String band Festival) in WV in a couple of days. I decided to have a booth this year to show and sell some banjos. I just finished up the last one yesterday and got some pictures of them all taken today. So I thought I would post some of the pictures and give a brief description on each. If your coming to Clifftop, make sure to stop by and say hello!

#10018
12" Block Cherry Rim with Bubinga Tone Ring
Cherry Neck with black stripe and German Silver Plate up to the 7th fret and at the scoop.

#10019
12" Curly Maple Rim with Walnut Cap and Whyte Laydie Tone Ring
Curly Maple Neck with Walnut Stripe

#10020
11" Block Cherry Rim with Ebony Cap, Hond. Roswood Tone Ring and aged Brass Hardware
Cherry Neck with Black Stripe

#10021
11" Curly Maple Rim with Bloodwood Cap and Bloodwood tonering with Rolled Brass Rod
Curly Maple Neck with Red Stripe

#10022
11" 100+ Year Old Chestnut Block Rim with Ebony Cap, Hond. Rosewood Tone Ring and Aged Brass Hardware
Birds Eye Maple neck with black Stripe

I'll post some more pics and some sound files when I get back.

A new Custom for an Irish Lad...

It's been awhile since I have updated my blog, I've been real busy this summer building banjos and doing repairs. Earlier this spring I finished up a custom long neck banjo for my buddy Kelly in Chicago and I am just getting around to posting some pictures of it.

It's a long neck open back with a maple neck and rim that features an ebony rim cap and heel cap, ebony fingerboard and headstock overlay, Nickel Silver Inlay and a mastertone style tone ring. I hand delivered this to Kelly at the Henry Reed Fiddlers Convention and he was in love at first site.

Kelly's going to be posting some more videos at his site, so head over to BanjoMania to see and hear this beast in action.

Wait a second, that's not a banjo?

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.

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.

The "Road Kill" Fiver...

Here is a recent build from my shop, it is a customized version of the "Road Kill" budget model. The owner of this one wanted a full length 5th string which required a custom Minstrel style headstock to accommodate the added tunning peg. It features the Bubinga wood tone ring and rim cap, Dobson style heel and rosewood fretboard and overlay.

I love it when a customer challenges me to build something new! Although the concept for a long 5th has been around for a very long time, it's certainly something you don't see often these days.

The "Road Kill" with a twist!

Here are some pictures of my latest custom banjo I am working on. It is a custom Road Kill model with a full length 5th string. The rim is 2 play Maple with Bubinga Wood Integral Tone Ring and cap. The rim is completed and the neck is roughed shaped at this point, I'll be wrapping this one up before the new year. The headstock features a minstrel style headstock thats enlarged to handle the extra tunning peg and wider nut for the full length 5th string.

A new life for Mc Cinnis Shaw.

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.

New Sounds..

Here is a sound file of the latest custom banjo the BM09005.

BM09005 A New Custom

This is the next custom to come out of my shop, BM09005 is truly a unique and outstanding banjo. It has a lot of great features. This custom banjo has a block form, yellow birch rim, with a Tubaphone tone ring. The rim has a Bloodwood cap that matches the Bloodwood heel cap on the neck. The neck has a center strip of Bloodwood surrounded by some beautiful curly maple. The fingerboard is Bloodwood with an underlay of white/red striping. The head stock is Bloodwood with the same white/red underlay and an overlay of veneer marquetry depicting a night scene in the mountains. The headstock and fingerboard feature inlays of white & gold MOP stars and moon completing the night scape theme of this custom banjo.

Here are some pictures of the finished banjo:

Front View

Back View

Headstock Marquetry & Inlay

Side Headstock profile showing striping

Bloodwood Fingerboard "Falling Star" Inlay

Rim Back

Side view showing strips and MOP side dots

This was a really challenging and fun build, the only thing negative about it is that I have to ship this beauty off to its new home! I'm sure it will be well taken care of.

Calling out the watchers..

I have noticed quite a bit of traffic to my blog lately, which is good. I would like to ask y'all a question though. What would you like to see here? I know it's not the most active blog going and I would like to make a greater contribution to the blogosphere. So I'm looking for ideas about what topics interest those who follow this and other builder blogs?

I have covered much of the different construction techniques I use, but could go more in depth if that interest people. I've also thought about doing a series of post on my favorite tools I use. I certainly will cover all of my latest builds once they are complete, but what else?

If you have any ideas or suggestions I would love to here them, post in the comments section or head over to the contact me tab and shoot me a email and let me know what y'all think.

Sounding Off

I got some request for a sound file of the Latest Custom Banjo to leave my shop. So I whipped up a quick sound file of me playing Lonesome John on it, you'll have to excuse the mistakes as my hands are cold and that's my story and I'm sticking too it.

Lonesome John on the Buzzard Mountain BM09005

Latest Custom Banjo

This is the latest custom banjo to leave my shop, it is a 11" maple rim with Rosewood Tone ring and cap and it features a short 24" scale length. The headstock design is a custom one designed around the customers love of Kayaking, so it is shaped after his favorite paddle. The headstock inlay is a Chakana or Inca Cross done in Abalone shell and gold MOP. The Rosewood in the picture is still very orange in color, over time (the next few months) it will naturally darken to a rich tobacco brown.

Here are a few pictures:

A couple of Ol'Timers

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.

A new neck for an old friend

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.

Old Gibson Conversion neck

Spunover Banjo Neck

Here is the new neck on this wonderful old banjo