Well I’ve slapped some strings on the Canjo to try it out….I was fed up with waiting to finish it completely.

Well…it plays….like a banjo really. The intonation is pretty well spot on….it’s a little more guitar like and less spranky than a proper drum headed instrument…..bit like a banjo crossed with a National Steel guitar.

Lessons learned? Well aside from vowing never to attack a lump of Jarra in earnest again, I think it’s fascinating that perfectly playable instruments can be made out of junk…..though it has to be said…a pug ugly ones! I may now indulge myself by creating a baritone guitar, a mandolin and any other junk yard orchestra instruments I can think of! I am even thinking about writing a book about it!

Tuner friendly!

The 'Canjo' neck is fretted......like the first Telecasters there is no separate fingreboard...the narrow banjo/mandolin frets are pressed straight into the neck. also like the first Teles there is no truss rod.......the Jarra is so hard and stiff there is absolutely no point! Above is a piccie of the ace-of-bodge job I have done making a 5th string tuner. I shortened the tuner shaft and re-bored and reamed the string hole......ten quid saved on a commercial banjo tuner!

HEAVY Man!

Well here it is partially complete....as ugly as...well... a lump of sub atomically heavy Jarrah wood temporarily clamped to a Roses sweetie tin that's roughly banjo shaped! the whole assemblage is so weighty I might have invented the worlds first heavy metal banjo. No fret slots cut yet and the neck needs half a ton more wood taken off it.....

'Ring Ring those....er....Cookie tins!

It’s amazing to me how crude a musical instrument can get away with being and still produce a pleasing sound in the hands of a skilled musician. If you type in cookie tin banjo or cigar box guitar into U tube you will get an idea of what can be done with very little…and indeed how our ancestors probably made music.

Yes this is the cue for yet another project…..I have always had a yen to try my hand at banjo….and hearing the results of others efforts at construction…I decided to chuck together a ‘Cookie Tin Banjo’. I have a large stock of Australian Jarra hardwood kicking about so I decided to sculpt a neck from that…….poor move……the stuff is soooo hard that virtually all tools bounce off it (okay so no truss rod will be needed) and boy do you get vicious splinters from it.

I’ve got it roughed out after two evenings of hard graft…note to self….don’t experiment with lovely looking hardwoods you’ve never worked with before unless you have adequate tools!

I have found however some fabulous software for calculating fret spacing, and better, printing out a ‘fret board’ on paper that can be stuck with Spraymount to the blank finger board then the fret slots cut through it with a ‘Gents saw’. This eliminates all the tedious marking and checking….result!

http://www.topshareware.com/Fret-Calculator-download-40998.htm

I will post photos of the beastie soon.

30th anniversary

It's thirty years since I built my first custom guitar to order........and this was it........seen in 1979.
It was quite a beast and well over the top....but then that suited the personality of the guy I built it for TomTaylor, at that time my boss at the music shop where I worked. The features were: an ash straight through neck with Honduras mahogany 'wings', two high output humbucking DiMarzio bass pickups with series/parallel and in/out of phase switches feeding in stereo to two (yes two) six band graphic equalisers and an active preamp! This was a fretless tone monster with a gaboon ebony fingerboard and a Leo Quan Badass bass bridge...Oh yeh and it weighed a bloody ton!

Making it safe!

Mucking about with valve amps is fun...but less so when the original manufacturer of my amp project's idea of a safe mains connection was a knotted (for strain relief) length of two core with a 1.5 amp slow-blow fuse in a weedy holder, they didn't have health and safety in 1964 clearly. As a concession to modern use I've chain drilled and punched out a hole in the back of the amp chassis for a three pin euro-socket, added a proper period Bakelite fuse holder and grounded the chassis to boot...that ought to stop all that leaky electricity making a big puddle on the floor that someone can step in!

I keep finding bits of redundant circuitry (left over from it's tape recording origins) in the amp as I work on it and have great satisfaction in ripping it out. Every time I junk something I fire up the amp to check I haven't trashed anything vital and so far so good.

Even though I've used valve guitar amps most of my playing life, their inner workings...short of simply swapping tubes...have always seemed some sort of voodoo to me. I decided that was going to change, so I started reading up on valves and amplifier theory...In fact I've gone a bit mad and burnt the midnight oil more than a few times learning my plate resistors from my cathode bias. This little amp has taught me more already than I can quite believe.

I'm now scouring e bay for a vintage 16 Ohm 12" speaker to go with the little beastie.

First little job on the valve amp was to remove the 'play/record' switch. This two position wafer switch gave me some headaches when I tried to figure out how to rewire and cut it out of the circuit......

It took an evening of looking it the job and a night of sleeping on it to work it out! I seem to have got it right as the little beastie fired up without self destruction....granted the wiring is a dogs breakfast and needs a length of tag strip to tidy it up but I have succeeded in impressing myself.

Now I need to sort out the input gain, as a humbucker overdrives the poor little machine too far!