Musical Instrument Building

Instrument-Building, page 2

Mr. Can and the Banjo's Return

Fast-forward through most of that twenty-six years. I had accumulated three (more like 2.75) electric guitars and a bass and listened to far more rock and Bach than clawhammer. Someone had replaced a pretty nice bridge pickup on their Ibanez ax with an EMG Select (go figure) and someone else had used too long screws on their neck (no, not like Frankenstein) and gone through it and cracked it to boot. My guess is that they took some meat off the heel without doing the shorter screws part of the job. Anyway, I got a used double-coil pickup and a used neck for cheap, and they started to look like a guitar project. I had an LP Jr. style bridge that hadn't been quite right to fix up that 0.75. Making a body seemed straightforward enough. I got a start at first with a toilet seat, but that lowly object turned out to have too many complex curves, and it was brittle. So I bought some poplar and invested a bit of koa I had laying around.
     The body outline is pure whimsy. It's nearly freehand with a jigsaw, the main constraint being the 12" width. I asked my son to make me some art for the back (not the front: I may want to play this in church some time). He drew his picture right on the guitar. I scanned the picture and colored it according to his instructions. I couldn't figure out how to make decal paper work, so I printed it on overhead film. That looked so awful glued on the guitar that I chopped up a second copy of Mr. Can (my son calls it the flying beer can but is underage, so I renamed it), and stuck on the bits with copious amounts of polyurethane. That didn't dry overnight, but it's hard as a rock now.
    This guitar looks really rough, but it plays very nicely and sounds just like I was hoping for. Clean or dirty, one coil or two (that's what the switch is for), it is molasses. Dang. I like the much-maligned LP Jr. style bridge. It's compensated for a wound G, and I like a wound G. But nobody stocks the light-gauge set with a wound G, so I have to by the one string loose. That bridge is easier to palm than any other, and it's rock-solid with no fiddly bits. I put it down fairly tight to the koa and got pretty good sustain that way. The knob (a bit of a cherry branch) is for volume. No tone-suckers for me.
     I returned to the banjo with a lot more knowledge than I'd had before, mostly courtesy of the Musical Instrument Makers' Forum. Still, it was difficult to get set up right. But it works, and it is surprisingly loud. It is a fun play. Scale length is only about 19". The tailpiece is adapted from a thing that Bissell made for cleaning out the brushes of their carpet sweepers. I put a graphite tube with a steel rod ("music wire") down the middle of the neck and spread epoxy on the fingerboard side of it. Another great crude but fun-to-play instrument.