banjo.

joint and neck dowel joint.

hoop bottom, where neck will screw to neck dowell.

hoop bottom screw from inside.

neck attached to hoop.

making the friction tuning pegs. the starting blank on the left and my first go (‘test peg’) on the right.

after rouglhy shaping the blanks i used a peg shaper, which is like a pencil sharpener which creates an even taper on the peg.

the peg shaper’s taper fits exactly with that of this reamer.

i did a test to test what depth to ream to.

i tried using oak for the pegs but when being turned in the shaper, it basically cleft the oak. i chose to use walnut as it has a closer grain.

here are the walnut pegs. i made a slight mistake on the drilling of the peg holes, drilled the bottom two to close together and had to make the handle on the bottom two pegs smaller so they could turn.

i whittled a (sheep leg) bone nut.

oak bridge and tailpiece.

the split happened because of the grain running perpendicular to pull of the tension.

when tensioning the strings the tailpiece split.

oiling (tung oil)

ian at lakeland coppice products quality controlling the product.