Buzzard Mountain Blog

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.

I have finished re-doing Patrick's S1 Prototype to his specifications. Some of you should remember that during shipping it got damaged.


So with the damage we took this opportunity to rework the banjo. Patrick wanted it to have the S2 headstock design instead of the traditional Vega headstock, and it is stained maple vs. walnut. This build has turned out great! I also had the opportunity to take this banjo to my Tuesday Night Jam and play it for a bit, and it sounds great and has no problem at all cutting through the noise of the bluegrass banjos in attendance.

Here are a few images to torture Patrick some, because he still wont have it in is hands until next week at the Folk Musicians Retreat.

Well I have finished up the conversion of the 20's era Little Wonder into a 5 string for my friend. I didn't take as many pictures as I should have but I will try to describe the process the best I can.

In the Part 1 post I showed pictures of the original Little wonder and the new Gold Tone neck he wanted attached.



The next step was to measure the existing dowel stick and create a new one. It measured 13/16" sq at the thick side and 7/16" sq at the thin side and approx 10 1/2" long. The rounded portion was 3/4" diameter and approx 1" long. I started by cutting a piece of hard maple to 13/16" sq by 12" long. I then put it on my lathe and turned down an end portion to the 3/4" diameter. Once that was complete I ran it through the table saw with a jig I set up to cut the proper taper. The fun part was drilling the 3/4" diameter hole in the neck to receive the new dowel, I built a little jig here as well to insure that my angles where correct. Once I had done a dry test fit, I then glued the dowel into place.



The rest was easy, just a bit of sanding and finishing on the new dowel. Then re-attaching all the existing hardware. A new set of 5 star tuners and stings and a little adjusting for the proper action and she is ready to play.









The owner didn't want any stain on this to match the pot, which is fine as the pot and neck are different colors anyway. So the dowel is just plain hard maple with a 3 coat hard oil finish and topped off with a bit of all natural bees wax.

This project required me to build several jigs, some of which I will certainly use again, others maybe not. One thing I have learned over the years is that it is always a good idea to set up jigs that help to keep accuracy in your work, even if its for a one time thing.

This banjo plays really nicely it has a nice subtle tone due mostly to the skin head. The new neck is finished with a thick "plastic" finish which I don't particularly care for but the end results are nice and should provide my friend with a great clawhammer banjo for years and years.