My daughter's saxophone

It's band season again (Yay!)and my younger daughter has reached the age of choosing an instrument. Much to my enjoyment, she has chosen saxophone. The search began and this old gal was found. It's a Buescher, from the late twenties if my research is correct. In any case, the price was right and the horn was in reasonable condition. Reasonable being a relative term. Let the restoration begin!

(for the record, these photos were taken by the seller, not me)

The Return

It's been painfully long since I updated. I actually haven't been making much but I now have spousal permission to start up again. I've been a taiko drummer for a while now, and I've been wanting to introduce some new drum types into my group's repertoire. I've started with some smaller drums called tsukeshime daiko more commonly referred to as just "shime" (pronounced something along the lines of "she-may") All the materials have been purchased and the ball is rolling (or is that drum rolling?) The body is a cylinder ten inches tall by ten in diameter made out of staves. The heads are stretched over metal rings fourteen inches in diameter and then held on with ropes which can be tightened to tune the pitch. I laid out the body to check my math, first. It'll look something like this.

 

Been A While, Thought I Should . . .

It's been a long time since I've posted anything. I've been working on a number of projects. Here is a portfolio/case I whipped up for my sketch book and drawing stuff to carry with me on the ferry. I was getting embarrassed by my zip-lock bags.
I did a quick sketch to put down what I had in mind:

And here's what I came up with for a finished product:

Made out of un-dyed 14oz cotton duck canvas with antique brass anorak snaps all around. It's not as white as it looks in the photos.

The Whole Set

Last post before the new year, I think. I figured I throw up an image (eew, gross!) of the whole set of them. The incomplete one on the right is a new over-sized design I'm trying. The person it's being made for is well over six feet tall, so I thought a taller cajon might be in order. And I wanted to see what it would sound like, too. Happy Holidays, everyone!

And He Reaches The Finish Line! (almost)

And here's the (almost) finished product. Red oak tappa on both front and back, rounded corners for more comfort when sitting on it and it sounds friggin' awesome. I've made a few others and this new one leaves them all behind sound wise. This is one of three I'm making as Christmas gifts for nieces and nephews, so I'm thrilled it plays so well. I'm going to wait until I get to Colorado to urethane them and put the little feet on the bottom because the humidity is just to high here right now and it would take forever to dry. (I know from experience)

I'll take some more photos of them in Colorado when they're finished and be sure to get them posted.

And It Starts To Look Like A Box . . .

It is a box drum after all, so the top is glued the top, the bottom is glued to the bottom and it starts to look like a box. Not rocket science. I also glued pieces of the quarter round into the slots on the upper corners. No more unsightly creases in your butt from the corners of the drum when you're playing. (For those of you unfamilar with cajones, you sit on top of the drum to play it.) Now it looks something like this.

I Digress Yet Again

For the whole both of you who follow my ramblings, sorry for the long pause between posts. Stupid holidays.

This digression is at least still in the realm of music. I've been unemployed more than employed over the last year, so I didn't really have big bucks for Christmas gifts. People always say how much they like hand made gifts, so I thought I'd see if it was true. I've been making cajones, which are Peruvian box drums, to give as gifts. I went down to my exotic wood dealer to see what they had that would fit the sort of drum I wanted to make.

I picked up some maple for the sides and top and some red oak and cherry for the tappa (the drumming surfaces). I also went to Home Depot and got some 3/4 in square stock for the frame and some red oak "quarter round" to execute an idea I had for the corners. I put quarter round in quotes because it's not actually quarter round, which is an even quarter circle in profile. This stuff I got is longer along half the curve making one side 3/4 and the other 1/2. I had chosen aspects of designs I had seen that I liked and thrown in some things I thought were original (until I saw that other people had been building cajons that way all along)

First, I cut the sound hole in one of the sides. Traditionally they're in the back, but I want two drumming surfaces, front and back, so I'll have to go with the side. My design has a recessed bottom and the top needs to be raised above the top of the sides to accommodate the corner trim, so I cut some of my frame stock and glued it flush with the top and brought it up a half inch from the bottom so I could recess the bottom.

Back To It

Started back up on the second cigar box guitar a couple of days ago. Glued on and shaped the fingerboard and made an ebony bridge for it. The holes for the bridge pins need to be tapered, and I don't have a bit for a drill that'll do that, so I drilled straight holes at the minimum diameter and then I'm using tapered files to ream the hole to appropriate size. It's a little time consuming and a little tough on my wrists, but it's turning out well. The bridge pins are white to match the keys on the tuning machines and the bridge is from the same ebony block the inlay on the fingerboard is made from, so hopefully it'll all fit together, design-wise, when it's finished. Once the bridge pin holes are finished it's time to urethane the guitar.

I Digress 3

I apologize for the lousy photo. Low light here today, so it's difficult to hold the camera still enough that it doesn't blur. I was surprised at how dark the 'khaki' came out, but not really upset. I wasn't trying to match the bags to anything else, so the color didn't really matter. Now I know what I get when I use khaki straight out of the jar. (I've mixed it with other dyes in the past). In the future if I'm looking for what I think of as khaki I guess I'll have to go with some species of tan. Anyway, there they are in all their finally finished glory. Now back to musical instruments.

I Digress 2

Here they are, all five of them put together and pre-washed in preparation for dying. The lengths of webbing have been cut for the straps and everything is pretty much ready to go. I'm going to go with khaki and see how they turn out, though they do sorta look cool white. I'll have to make some white ones some day, maybe.

I Digress

 

I know this probably seems strangely random, but I thought it had been too long since my last post and decided to go ahead and put this up here. The short version of the long story is I stalled on the banjo because I needed some good material for the fingerboard and I was waiting for the fret wire to arrive in the mail. Not wanting to sit idle I thought I would make a case for the first cigar box guitar. I've been playing it a LOT and thought it would be nice to have an easy way to transport it. Well, I got the case nearly done (I'll show you next post) but it needed some straps and handles. All the webbing I had for straps and handles was raw and needed to dyed. I've been working on these shoulder bags, which I was also going to dye, so I decided to finish the shoulder bags first and dye the webbing for both the shoulder bags and the guitar case at the same time. So, here's what's what with the shoulder bags.



I'm making five of them at the same time so I can dye them all in the same lot. The straps will be dyed to match. They're from a pattern I made myself based (fairly closely) on a WWII Britsh Mk VII gasmask bag. I have one that I completed a while back in the image to give a better idea of where it's going. I'll throw up another image of the completed bags, snaps, dyed and all, when I get there.

 

One More Little Step Closer

I cut a groove in each piece of the frame for the head to insert into, then assembled it all to make sure everything fits together like it should. The body of the banjo will looks something like this. Sorta like a big Chinese Pa Qua Mirror. I hope it doesn't end up looking too strange.

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.

Another In A Long List . . .

 

. . . of hair-brained ideas. The second cigar box guitar, even though it was turning out fairly well, was causing me a great deal of frustration. I was trying to make a trim piece to go around where the neck inserts into the body and on the third failed attempt (and subsequent waste of expensive/exotic hardwood) I decided to step away from it for a bit. I'm going to go on to something else and will come back to it when the mutual hostility has subsided.
     This next project is going to be a banjo. I know even less about banjos than I do about guitars, so I don't know what I'm thinking 'cept I think it's going to be fun. I spent a fair amount of time going through ideas on what to do about the 'pot'. I thought about using a commercially produced hand drum as a base, I considered stretching my own drum head, as I've done that making taiko drums so it's something I'm familiar with . . . various things were possibilities. But then in my research I ran across some reference and images of banjos with metal heads. They're not common, but they are out there, and for whatever reason the idea appealed to my twisted brain. So a metal head it is.  Now, how to go about it?



    I went on a quest to find something that could be repurposed to be my metal banjo head. I was looking everywhere. Nothing I was finding seemed right. When The Wife Unit asked what I was looking for I said, "Something I can use as a metal banjo head. They look something like this." and showed her an image I had found. She said, "Looks like a pie tin." The thud from me smacking my forehead could be heard a block away. My search continued in the kitchen section of our local dry goods store. I decided to go with a tart pan. The bottom is removable. I'm not sure if I'm going to find a way to use the side segment or not, but the bottom will be perfect .

Fitting The Neck

I needed to be able to put the neck into the body to fit various other parts of the guitar, so it was time to cut the notches. The joint doesn't fit as tightly as I wanted it to, but it's going to have to do. The taper at the bottom of the neck looks and fits against the box exactly as I had hoped it would. I won't glue the neck into the box for a while yet. Still more finish work to do and I have to drill it for the tuning machines first, but at least now I can stick it together and have a decent idea of where it's all headed.

Inlay Sucks

At some point along the way I decided that I was going to make this one fretless, but that I would inlay fret markers so when you're playing it you have some idea of where to put your fingers or stop your slide. I have a nifty router and a tiny router bit to cut the grooves and I have left over ebony that I can cut down and fill the grooves with, right? Seemed like a good idea at the time. The fingerboard is red oak. I've been wanting to try a red oak fingerboard for quite a while. Well, it's got hard and soft spots that the router doesn't like at all. That's a pretty minor difficulty, though. I just went slow and kept it tight to the fence and I got through it well enough. Then came the time to cut the ebony into one eighth inch wide strips that I can glue into the grooves. That's a lot easier to say than it is to do, let me tell you. I won't be in a hurry to inlay on another instrument in the future unless I can come up with a much easier way to cut the inlay material. Once the remaining eight fret markers are placed I'll cut the fingerboard to the appropriate taper and sand the fret markers down until they're flush with the fingerboard surface.

Neck Improved

So I said, "Wife. What do you think about my adding the taper to the bottom of the neck where it attaches to the block, like in a classical guitar. It'll just be aesthetic, 'cause the neck goes all the way through, but it might look kinda cool" Wife said, "I think you should".  Many days and raw, aching hands later this wonderful feature has been added to the neck. Moral of the story: Keep your fool mouth shut. Anyway, this is the neck as it looks now. I've got some more sanding to do, then I have to drill the tuning machine holes, then I can attach it to the body. Now I've gone and ruined the surprise of what the next few posts will be. See how I am?

Roughed In Neck

Cut the neck piece and glued on the headstock, then roughed in the taper of the neck. I've been thinking more about the part of the neck that attaches to the soundboard (top of the cigar box). How loud the guitar plays is affected by the size of the volume of air it causes to vibrate. Larger resonating chamber, louder volume, in simplistic terms. In addition the more of the surface of the sound board allowed to vibrate freely the better, so the neck should be glued to it along the smallest area that will still be structurally acceptable. So, like the previous guitar, I cut 'shelves' in the neck where it inserts into the cigar box. One level for where it will be glued, cut down so that the top of the sound board will be flush with the top the neck so the fingerboard will glue down properly. The next level down to prevent the neck from making contact with the soundboard, allowing it to vibrate freely. Then I took a piece out of the center in an attempt to reduce the amount of space the neck takes up inside the resonating chamber. If nothing else, it made the guitar lighter, which isn't bad either. I have no idea if these things really make a difference or not, but I'm going to go ahead and try them and see what happens.

Here We Go Again

Guitar no. 2. These are the materials I'm working with. This one is going to progress more slowly than the last, however, because I can't dedicate my full attention to it. Lots of other things going on. The new cigar box is a Chavon Dominicano. I thought the foil label was particularly cool. I've got a piece of oak that I dug out of the rubbish pile at an industrial site (I actually got three pieces. Straight, nice lookin, quite a find) for the neck, a piece of red oak for the fingerboard which is already planed down and properly tapered and left over scraps of the ebony I used on the previous guitar. I'm looking forward to this one. I have some new ideas that I want to try out.

Just In Case You Were Curious

This is what it sounds like.

some random cords
simple finger style example

Please don't be too critical, I don't actually play guitar. Hopefully it'll give you an idea, anyway. This is unamplified, straight acoustic. The recordings sound less like a banjo to me than the instrument does in person. Kinda interesting. Anyway, on to the next project.