Buzzard Mountain Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:















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.

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

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:

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