But it's Perfectly Good!

Craig's List Score
Originally uploaded by Usonian.

I scored an old Harmony Marquis banjo from Craig's List last Friday. Sight unseen I figured I could harvest the tailpiece, tension hoop, tension hooks, nuts, and (if it had them) hex or shoe bolts from the thing, hardware that would cost more to buy separately nowadays... and wind up with a spare neck, pot, and resonator as part of the deal.

Old brands like Harmony and Kay are the target of much scorn among banjo enthusiasts, and not without reason; they tended to be cheaply made, with pots made out of either bakelite or (as is the case with this Harmony) solid aluminum, and more often than not they'd be poorly set up... the end result being that aspiring banjo players would be frustrated away from the instrument.

Given that reputation, I was surprised how solid this banjo felt when I saw it... it looks like it's seen very little use over its 30ish+ year existence. There's some damage to the binding right near the 5th string peg and the fake mother of pearl inlays have yellowed a bit, but other than that the only wear I see are the sorts of nicks and scratches an instrument would pick up from kicking around the corner of somebody's living room without a case. There's even still a protective layer of paper on the truss rod cover, never removed.

Whoever strung the instrument last probably contributed a great deal to its non-use; strings were attached to the tailpiece in apparently random order, which means they're crossing the bridge at impossible angles and wanting to pull it out of position. The friction fifth string peg was loose, which would have been tremendously frustrating, and the other four strings were tuned way too low.

The yankee pragmatist in me observes all of this, and says, "Why, for the cost of a new set of strings and an hour or so of tinkering, you'd have a perfectly good knockabout resonator banjo!"

The only problem is, I really don't need a knockabout resonator banjo. I find myself concentrating on clawhammer playing these days, and one neglected resonator banjo is quite enough!

I also feel a little bit of guilt at the thought of dismantling this instrument, which seems like it never got a chance to make much music; with decent set-up, it could be an entirely servicable starter banjo for somebody... although I doubt I'd be able to get much more for it than what I paid, and it's certainly not worth spending the time or money to repair the binding and upgrade the tuning pegs. So, in the end I expect it will be coming apart as soon as I have a rim that needs hardware.

Cigar Box Guitar #1, Part I

Until I scrape together the cash to buy the rest of the hardware for my tenor banjo, I'm going to have a go at making a cigar box guitar. I'm making the scale a mandola-ish sort of length (17.5 inches) and giving it four strings.

There are quite a few people building cigar boxes out there, and there seems to be a bit of reverse snobbery around these instruments ("All you need is a box and a plank!", "Who needs to pay hundreds of dollars for one of them Martins when you can make a cigar box guitar at home in an afternoon!" "Listen to what I can do with three strings!", et cetera.)

I can understand the appeal of throwing together a functional instrument very quickly; it feels like I've been working on my tenor banjo forever. However, I'm not particularly interested in going to the "box and plank" extreme; I want something that I'll want to look at and play for more than an hour or two once it's complete.

Cigar box instruments seem like a good niche for a novice like me:

• I can practice just about any aspect of building "real" instruments except for the body itself; neck, joints, inlay, finishing.
  
• If I screw up somewhere, chances are good I'll only be out a few bucks.
• Were I to start selling these things, expectations of fit and finish would be considerably lower than if I were making dreadnought clones, yet I could probably price them high enough to make a bit of profit which I could turn around and invest in tools and supplies for "real" instrument work.

I picked up a nice sturdy, wooden Encanto cigar box last weekend, and got to work.

One of the first things I did was to make a miter box for cutting a low-angle scarf joint for the neck peghead joint. 15 degrees is the traditional angle, but my wooden, hand-cut miter box turned about a couple of degrees more acute than that.

For an instrument like this, I'm not particularly bothered by it. It means a little bit less surface area for the joint, but it should certainly be fine for nylon strings. When I move up to guitar necks I'll invest the time and money in making a jig like the one that Kathy Matsushita uses.

The joint came out surprisingly clean despite being hand-cut with my rickety box.

I did a bit of sanding and then drilled a 1/4 hole more or less perpendicular to the joint, through both pieces. I glued everything up with a piece of 1/4 dowel through the hole. I'm not sure how much extra strength it will actually add to the joint, but I know I've seen it done on a couple of lutherie pages out there.

My dad will be gratified to know that I've already found a use for the old jigsaw he gave me last month. I used this saw on innumerable Cub Scout projects twenty plus years ago, and bringing it home was a bit like seeing an old friend again.

To cut the soundhole I put a nail through the pivot point of the cigar box lid into a scrap of wood bolted to the jigsaw table, positioning everything so that the blade fell exactly at the outer radius of the circle from the pivot.

I also drilled a small hole in the lid ahead of time to let the blade through.

Both of my soprano ukes' soundholes are 1.75 inches in diameter, so I decided to start there. I haven't decided whether it looks a tad too small or not.

There is quite a lot of information out there about the physics of soundholes and soundboxes, but not being a physicist a lot of it is over my head (not to mention overkill for a cigar box.) One thing I took away from what little reading I did is that too large of a soundhole relative to the size of the air chamber means poor response from the instrument top. Since you can always take more wood off, but you can never put it back on, 1.75 inches it is.

After the neck joint dried I cut the fret slots. I'm not using a fingerboard for this instrument, so I cut the slots before profiling the neck; much easier to make perpendicular cuts that way. It would have been even easier if I had cut the slots before gluing the peghead joint; that way the neck would have sat flat in the miter box.

After gluing on another small block of wood at the heel, and putting a maple veneer on the peghead to cover up the scarf joint, I went ahead and trimmed the neck profile and peghead outline.

Compared to the stop-and-start progress on my still-incomplete tenor banjo, this thing is coming together lightning fast. This is at how things looked after two sessions in the workshop.

After a busy week I was eager to get back to this project in hopes of getting it strung this weekend. Maybe a little too eager; I tried using the bandsaw at an angle to rough out angles along the neck that will eventually be curves, and trimmed a little more away than I really wanted.

The thing I need to keep reminding myself is that I've already spent considerably more time on this thing than many people would, and that the neck will be perfectly functional despite being a little bit uneven in those spots.

Sanding has gone fairly quickly, although there's a stubborn spot of glue down at the heel block, and as always there are a few bandsaw nicks that may be deep enough to require filler, rather than sanding down everything around them. I need to get a bandsaw blade with a closer set.

Finally, I drilled holes in the peghead for the 1/4 posts of the guitar-type tuners I'll be using for the instrument.

I might actually have this thing fretted and strung by the end of my next session in the workshop!