Building A Rim

   The bodies of banjos are made of either wood or metal. Metal would be no fun 'cause I'd just have to buy a pre-made one. That sort of defeats the purpose of making your own.  As near as I can tell there are two ways to make a wooden one. Either by laminating thin pieces of wood around a wooden form which requires steaming the wood like bending the sides of a traditional acoustic guitar or by gluing straight pieces together into a hexagon and then rounding them on a lathe. If I had a lathe I'd be making flutes and clarinets. The whole reason I'm making strings is because I can't have a lathe in my living room. So I decided to skip the lathe part, but go with the second approach anyway. I made myself a mitre box with he appropriate angles cut in it and went to work.

   I was willing to put up with some facets around the outside, but a hexagon just didn't seem round enough for me, so I decided to go with twelve sides (this time. Next time I might go with 24, but I wanted to see if this was going to work first.)  When I was done carefully cutting all twelve I put them all together to see how they fit. This is what I got.