Here is a blow by blow account of the installation of a new
skin.
This is the rim. It
is a simple wooden hoop, from a basic tenor dating from the 1930s or so. As such, it is a bit ovalized – out of
round. These sometimes present a
challenge since there’s not much symmetrical about them. The skin needs to be stretched with special
care to avoid crimping up at points where the tension hoop, flesh hoop and skin
come together.
Below is the tension hoop that came with this rim. When I remove the rim from the neck and start
the task of taking the pot apart I mark the way the tension hope was oriented
on the rim – usually placing some signal in the form of tape or pencil marks
that shows where the tension hoop sat above the opening for the perch pole or
the perch pole exit joint with the rim.
This helps by telling me how to align an ovalized tension hoop with an
out of round rim.
I try to use the original flesh hoop that comes with the
pot. In some instances these were held
in circle form by inventive means – thread, glue, piping. In other instances only the pressure of the
fit of the skin held the flesh hoop in position. I have also used store bought brass rods as
well as the circular metallic frame used in hubcaps, and dry cleaner hangers.
When I require a bit of stability I will use metal tape to
secure the two ends of the brass rod – and here I’m talking about metal tape of
the sort that one might use in securing a disposable vent pipe to a washing
machine/dryer setup. I also use brass
tubing to achieve the same joining function on a flesh hoop. So far, I have not used any sort of weld or
solder. I prefer using ways that are
reversible especially since on these out of round rims mid course corrections
are often required.
Here’s the tape in question.
I tend to keep a tub of water on the workbench I use to fit
skins. Again, if a mid-course correction
is required (because the flesh hoop needs to be refashioned or adjusted, or the
skin proves stubborn or inappropriate for the banjo in question) I want to be
able to re-immerse the skin or quickly soak another skin.
Here’s a skin floating in the plastic bin I use as a soaking
tub.
So, back to the rim:
I pull the soaking skin out of the plastic bin in which it
has been luxuriating in tap water, and drape it over the top of the rim:
I use a 16 inch skin because that gives me the most purchase
when I need to grab a hold of the skin to get some tension around the edges as
I’m stretching the thing.
The next thing I do is lay the flesh hoop over the
skin. I try to orient things so that the
joint of the flesh hoop is situated above the entry hole for the neck and the
dowel dowel stick. Orienting things this
way maximizes the extent to which this flesh hoop joint will be hidden when the
deed is done.
I will usually give an original flesh hoop a coat of
Rustoleum paint – silver, bronze or black, using whichever paint is the closest
in color to the original metal composing the flesh hoop. This tamps down rust and minimizes the
oxidation that results when a wet skin is seated on a rusting flesh hoop.
Here’s how things look so far:
And here’s the flesh hoop adjusted for depth around the rim:
The next thing I do is place the tension hoop over this,
folding the exposed skin that falls outside the flesh hoop under the tension
hoop to create the lock, and the means of achieving tension on the skin over
the center of the rim.
Here’s how it looks when the skin is tucked through and the
tension hoop and flesh hoop are situated in a way that will allow me to achieve
that skin tension.
You can see the slack in the middle of the rim where the
skin isn’t sitting precisely tensioned evenly across the top largely because of
the ovalized shape the rim has assumed over years, and the slight discrepancies
that might emerge in sandwiching all this stuff together – flesh hoop, tension
hoop and rim. That ends up creating
crimps along the edge of the tension hoopp that look like this:
The goal in this situation is to stretch the skin out along
the tension hoop to eliminate these crimps.
Here I’ve ioslated one such crimp and I will manipulate the
skin, and as necessary the surfaces of the metal parts – flesh and tension hoop
– in the hope of erasing any such folds or crimps.
The above photo shows a point at which the flesh hoop and
the rim meet in a way that exposes more of the hoop, especially on an ovalized
section of the rim, so that the hoop doesn’t exactly take the shape of the
rim. That is a recipe for crimps. And other complications such as not being
able to situate the hooks so that they can exert even pressure around the
rim.
When I’m stretching the skin, putting tension on the skin by
pulling the sections that flop over the sandwich composed of the flesh
hoop/skin/tension hoop, I’m looking to see points at which the skin knows up on
the flesh hoop son I can single them out and pull them straight.
In the end, this is what I get:
I tend to set the “excess” skin up by smoothing it out over
the tension hoop so that I can cut if off easily. In this instance, note the way the point at
which the two ends of the brass rod that formed the original flesh hoop came
together at the entry point for the dowel stick. The skin pouted a bit there and I had to make
adjustments to get it tighter. Actually,
in this case I ended up removing the skin and using another flesh hoop. The original was too thick and kept slipping
under the tension hoop.
Here’s the end result:
There is one more step. Some years ago, Bob Smakula of Elkins, West Virginia, a superb instrument repair man and a talented clawhammer player, taught me the value of spraying Scotchguard on a new, dried skin head. That step helps manage the impact of humidity on the banjo head. I usually spray twice, for good measure.
I order my skin heads from a variety of South Asian entrepreneurs. There are any number of more commercially refined sources here in the U.S. that introduce quality control, bleached white coloring, and other tailored specifications to the product. However, for me there's something satisfying in the knowledge that Pakistani herdsmen can be shown by their clever capitalist cousins in the U.S. how to cure and shape the product to "code" for modern banjo requirements, and thus contribute to modern day efforts in America to capture the sound and spirit of old time music with its origins in old Africa.
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