Honeytone #27 update-
It's a cold, rainy morning, here in Virginia, and up here in my Scroll Shop I am admiring the reanimated #27... finally a playable instrument again after several years of being decommissioned parts. Happy to report, it sounds amazing, passing my expectations, which is partly dumb luck, because I have never done a pot assembly quite like this one, but I can take a little bit of credit for the fitting, assembly and setup.
So like I was saying, this pot assembly is a little bit different in construction by virtue of being a block type, rather than a 3-ply rim, made like a drum. This is traditionally how banjo shells were made... three or four 1/4" layers of maple, wrapped into an 11" diameter hoop that once turned on a lathe, milled out to a 3/4" thick shell that could be machined further to fit whatever tonering or flange was to be used. But my donor shell here, it was made of maple
blocks all glued together, then turned on the lathe. And our usual tonering of choice is a simple 11" diameter brass hoop, made of 1/4" stock. Rings like a bell, and produces very few unwanted harmonic overtones. Plus, it doesn't make an already inherently heavy instrument into a backbreaker. Trick is, it needs to sit, perched perfectly on a little seat, right at the peak of the shell, and I had to do this somewhat by hand, working to cut lines with rasps, files, and hand carving. The flat surface at the top was the easy part! After some finish-sanding, I assembled the whole pot assembly, 24 hooks and nuts hold that drum head taut under a new nickel-plated brass tension hoop, pulling up on a nickel-plated cast flange. Wow, that's a
lot of shiny parts, destined to tarnish! I set it aside to work on the neck.
Fitting the old neck back to a new shell was a good exercise. Dad is fanatical about this fit... claims it is crucial to the overall sound of the instrument. I don't doubt that, just understanding how a string oscillates between two points, and anything that buffers that action is detrimental to it. So the heel of the neck needs to fit the shell. Unfortunately, the angle was a bit too steep, so I had to add a little shim to the lower heel. (adding a couple pics, so you can see how this works...) I put everything together a few times, and finally, when I had the bridge height just right in a dry-fit, I installed the neck to the pot assembly and snugged everything down. It was time to install the tuning machines and string it up...
Hang on, it's about to get good.
