This led to the next logical step, gluing on the ebony peg head veneer.

After the glue had fully cured I moved on to cutting the profile of the peg head. I drew up a sketch of what I wanted in illustrator, the dimensions for the holes were based off of other pegheads to ensure that my strings wouldn’t go wonky in the end. The profile was cut out of a scrap piece of plastic I had laying around, this gave me a nice guide to follow when I cut everything on the bandsaw. The look that I was after had the cuts perpendicular to the fret board rather than the pegboard. To achieve this a simple jig was needed to hold the piece level relative to the fret board surface.

Ta-da! The next step will be to drill the holes for the pegs and to file the edges smooth

Note: Take everything I do while making this with a grain of salt, I have never done this before and am making up many things as I go along. This is definitely a learning process for me.

For the neck of the banjolele I went with a strip of red oak sandwiched between two pieces of maple. After these were glued together and allowed to dry I attached a template of the side profile of the neck.

A few cuts later…

To save on wood used I only made the neck block as thick as the bottom end of the neck, this meant that the pegboard would need to be widened using two small “ears.”

The next step was to cut out the rough profile of the neck using the bandsaw. Doing this first would save me hours of shaping with a file and rasp.

With that I had a rough neck ready to be shaped and sanded.

Rather than starting off with up to date content I am going to throw up some things from the summer. To start it off I would like to show you a lovely picket fence that I helped to build this summer. This is the fence that we replaced. It still looks great considering it is 40+ years old! But alas, some areas are starting to rot pretty bad leading to boards that fall off easily.

It was a formidable task to make all 270 pickets needed to complete the entire span. I started off with eight foot lengths of 3×1″ spruce boards (I believe that the original fence was also spruce). After I cut them all in half I started the fun task of giving them a point. This took a while but was a cake walk compared to the next task, cutting notches. Now seeing as I really didn’t want to spend the next four weeks carefully measuring and cutting out notches I decided to make this handy dandy jig, and used the appropriately named jig saw, to cut out the notches. This made the job a snap, with each piece taking only 30 seconds or so to cut. After that was all done I managed to get out of painting them all (Yes!). But I was not done yet! There is still the task of attaching them. Once again I had no desire to carefully measure and space each and every one, so out came another jig. In no time at all the fence was up and ready to protect the farm from the rogue zombie hordes of the prairies.