The new banjo has begun.

Well, today I went out to my friend Sage's workshop to surface a half dozen neck blanks. He's got a really cool shop where he does carpentry and builds extremely unusual (and great sounding) travel guitars. It snowed here in Boston last night, but there was a little wood stove inside the shop, so that helped.

Here's one of the amazing guitars



And here's a 3-D repeating router he built (note the hand carving he made using it)

Just finished another one - this time based on the banjo I just shipped to Rick. It was simply too nice a banjo to resist, so now I have my own. It's a little fancier, so it took a little longer to build. Heres a shot of the tailpiece before and after the inlay was set.



And here are the photos of the banjo itself.

It seems that people are always contacting me and asking if I can build banjos with adjustable heads and hardware. Well, the answer is yes, I can. However, I am not building them right now. I haven't gotten tackheads out of my system yet, but will be turning to banjos with hardware very soon, and plan to be building and selling such instruments by this summer. I am in the process of retooling my shop a bit, and also thinking about different hardware designs. I won't be doing any casting, but will instead by machining parts out of brass and steel. I'll be building a few for myself, first, and then they'll hit the market.

Also, I updated the "listen" section with a couple new tunes from Tim Twiss - Sugar in De' Gourd, and Ethiopian Cracovienne. They are fantastic recordings, so check them out when you can.