JoshuaWeber.com » Making

Making of a Banjolele – Part 2

Josh — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:00:01 +0000

In my last post I had just finished cutting out the rough profile of the neck. The next step was to shape the neck using rasps and files, patience was definitely the key for this part. I neglected to take any pictures of this step. This is a shot after shaping, with the peg head and fret board wood temporarily in place to get an idea of what the finished neck will look like.

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

Banjolele!

Josh — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 03:54:31 +0000

Progress! I have all the in between pictures saved, just need to go through them all.

Making of a Banjolele – Part 1

Josh — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:29:39 +0000

This was a project that I had started before Christmas with the intention of it being a Christmas present for a special someone, but alas I have yet to finish! Since I am back at school again I have some nice blocks of dead space between classes which I figure is a perfect time to make some posts about the process that I am going through to build this stringed instrument.

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.