In July 2012 a gentleman named Stan hauled a banjo to my shop. It was a real unique piece of work. The banjo had an ornately decorated rim, and a heavy ebony neck with a nice patina.
The tuners looked like original Champions which were patented by Lars L Filstrup in May 1888. The fingerboard had partial-fret job.
Interestingly, with some help from Banjo Colleagues, the patent for these particular tuners has been located. That helps date the thing to the late 1880s.
Unfortunately, the neck had a serious wound:
I removed the
neck on 23 July, revealing a dowel stick crack.
It was clear that the tuners could be cleaned and made functional. But the neck fracture, which radiated north
and south of the fifth string peg hold, was another matter.
I spent about
three days staring at the part of the neck that was crack, taking photos and
blowing them up, probing the crack, poking around without disturbing things too
much. The break had twisted out a
portion of the fingerboard, but miraculously had not dislodged the frets. It had loosened the star inlay, and then –
possibly because of the way the banjo was stored all these years – essentially
frozen in place.
That is, it was
not a greenstick fracture than could be clamped and coaxed by pressure into
place. It may have happened when someone
years ago attempted to seat a mechanical fifth string tuner in the hole. I say this because the tuners are clearly
after market. It was probably originally
equipped with fiddle tuners, simple wooden tuners. The peghead tuners were not made for a convex
shaped peghead back, so they don’t quite sit right.
I thought there were
several alternative courses of action for addressing the neck fracture.
One could remove
the fingerboard – there was, indeed, a separate fingerboard but it was an
eighth inch thick board so I doubted it could be removed easily through heating
or steaming. And shaving this thin a
fingerboard off would be fraught with problems.
One could simply
fill the gap in a manner that would allow the fifth string tuning peg to be
anchored strongly – that would involve some doweling work to fill the fifth
string peg hole and then redrilling to accommodate the peg. However, I thought that wouldn’t solve the
problem of the way the break fractured the fingerboard top. Instead, it would be the minimally cosmetic
fix to the thing.
Finally, as I
saw it, one could remove the 4th and 5th fretwires – the
frets flanking the star inlay, cut down through the fingerboard, and level the
areas beyond the frets in question, grafting a piece of ebony into the leveled
plan, replacing the star inlay, and reattaching the fretwires in channels shaped
into the grafted piece. I thought it was
possible that the original wood removed from around the star could be reused
with a substrate. It would mean that the
thickness of the fingerboard in the area of the star inlay would be undetectable
thinner than the rest of the fingerboard, undetectable because both the neck
and the fingerboard are ebony.
This last course
of action was the one I intended recommend, but it wasn’t the final course of
action I followed.
What I did first
was clean and repair the tuners, ream out the peghead holes for the tuners, and
then set them aside. I spent some time recessing
the perimeter around the peghead tuner holes in the back of the neck to
accommodate the tuners more effectively.
The back of the peghead was rounded, and I had to flatten a plane so
that the tuners would smoothly function.
The ebony was
dry and brittle. One of the ears
cracked, but it cleaved in three pieces that I was able to glue and clamp
together.
I had to pin the
ear that split off, meaning that had to drill a hole in the side of the peghead,
insert a dowel for stability in the ear.
I did that for the ear that did not split off just to be preemptive; if
one ear splits the other is likely to do so, especially given the character and
condition of the wood.
I decided to
attack the 6th fret separately from the three frets that sustained
the brunt of the damage. The 6th
fret was the beginning point for the twist or tension that originated the
fracture and as a consequence it sustained only minimum damage that did not
descend below the bottom of the fingerboard ply.
I sawed through
both the south and the north ends of the fingerboard for the 6th
fret and removed the fingerboard.
I chiseled and
sanded off the glue to reveal the raw wood.
I cut a thin piece of rough ebony as a substrate and glued/clamped that
in place. On top of that I installed a
better quality ebony veneer, and clamped it in place overnight. I sanded the edges to take the shape of the
neck, and left enough space to re-insert the frets.
I attacked the
remaining frets the same way. These were
the real damaged portions of the board where I had to sand, re-dye the ebony,
re-sink the fifth string tuner, finish the fingerboard and neck, and do some
cosmetics on the peghead.
I shaped maple
and ebony for substrate, glued and sanded, accomplished some initial ebony dust
filler cosmetics and sanding. I had my
friend Zack Deming, a talented banjo player and long time banjo builder and
repairman, cut the shield inlay. I
reshaped the hole and fit it properly.
The hard part
was the excavation of the 5th fret area, and the effort to shape
ebony overlay for area around tuner.
Given the thinness of the exposed channel for the fifth string peg, I secured
fifth string tuner in place (metal glue).
I shaped star
inlay, repaired broken point, positioned on ebony fingerboard, dremelled a hole
for star, glued, positioned, and started sanding to even fingerboard. I shaped the nut (StewMac white plastic), re-seated
the four frets, and drilled the pip hole.
While doing that, the bottom of the 5th string area broke
out. Glued, clamped, sanded that. I re-dye the fingerboard, and put on several
layers of tung oil.
Each application
was allowed to dry overnight, and then buffed with 0000 steel wool. Then I coated it twice with bee’s wax, buffed
it each time, and let it dry for a day before doing the basic set-up work.
Here’s a video
of a test drive of the Stanraci banjo, as I call it after a version of the
owner’s name.
The Nylagut
strings have a way to go before they are stretched and stable.
Everything is a
challenge. There’s usually something
unexpected that crops up in working with these real old pieces. That is a big part of the charm of this
work.
No comments:
Post a Comment