("Woodshop Rag" plays) - Welcome to the "Volunteer Woodworker."
I'm your host, Charles Brock.
We're gonna be travelin' the back roads, finding the best woodworkers around.
Won't you come join me.
We're going to Santa Fe, Tennessee, to meet Bill Lester.
He's the Banjo Man.
- [Announcer] "Volunteer Woodworker" is funded in part by, since 1970, Whiteside Machine Company has been producing industrial grade router bits in Claremont, North Carolina.
Whiteside makes carbide bits for edge forming, grooving, and CNC applications.
Learn more at whitesiderouterbits.com.
Real Milk Paint Company makes VOC-free non-toxic milk paint available in 56 colors.
Milk paint creates a matte wood finish that can be distressed for an antique look.
Good Wood Nashville designs custom furniture and is a supplier of vintage hardwoods.
Keri Price with Keller Williams Realty has been assisting Middle Tennessee home buyers and sellers since 2013.
Mayfield Hardwood Lumber, supplying Appalachian hardwoods worldwide.
Anna's Creative Lens, crafters of resin on wood decorative arts.
- Bill Lester.
- Chuck, glad to have you.
- [Charles] Oh, this is great.
Not only are we in a real official tiny house that you and your wife Robin designed.
We're in Santa Fe, Tennessee.
- That's right, not Santa Fe, Santa Fe.
- Ah geez, I guess the locals just call it Santa Fe.
- They do, which according to the locals is the correct pronunciation.
- [Charles] (laughs) It's nice to be corrected.
- (laughs) That's right.
- Now, tell me about the architecture and the design of the tiny house.
- Well, yeah, we moved out here after my wife and I retired and moved from our bigger house.
We wanted to downsize, and we had this property, we absolutely loved it.
And originally, I had designed a big house, and I kept changing the design, and it took like a couple of years just to kinda get through it.
And my wife realized I was never going to actually be able to build a house that big, so she said, "Well, let's do a small house that we'll add onto later."
And so we built this small house, and now we've been here for three years.
We still haven't added on, because to be honest with you, really, really love having just 600 square feet to have to worry about.
We've got everything we want.
But we did the framing, we did the siding, we did the roof.
We built both the shop and the house, and my wife put the roof on.
She was, not only on this, but also on the shop, which is two stories high.
I made a little ladder for her, and I tied a rope around her, but she got up there with the nail gun and the sheeting and just went to town.
She's less afraid of heights than I am, plus she could fit through the rafters.
I couldn't do that.
Well, welcome to the shop.
- Banjo Land, oh man.
Some beautiful banjos.
- Yeah, thank you.
- Fretted one here, and this one's fretless.
- Yeah, this is a fretless banjo.
I couldn't bring myself to saw a bunch of grooves into this beautiful Macassar ebony that I had, and I put some nylon strings on it, which is a little bit different.
And it's also tuned different.
It's tuned to what they call a sawmill tuning, and which is kind of more of a darker tuning, but you can play some old timey kind of songs, that sort of thing.
- Very old timey, yes.
- And it's walnut and the rim, the rim is hickory, and it's steam bent hickory.
And the tone ring, this is the tone ring, which is sort of a beveled piece of rosewood, and that's very dense wood.
I use dense woods for the tone ring, more of acoustical sort of woods, and then I'll put a trim cap on it to kind of conceal the layers of that sort of thing.
- [Charles] Bill, how did you get interested in building banjos?
- Well, my granddad was a banjo player, I loved my granddad, and on Sundays, we'd go over to the house, and then they'd have a regular hootenanny.
Everybody'd sit around, he'd play his old banjo, and my cousins and uncles would play their guitars and harmonicas.
And my brothers and I, we couldn't play anything, but I used to always would sneak his banjo out and go into his room and look at it.
And I thought, man, this thing is a piece of junk.
It was 100 years old, probably at the time.
Had no ornament on it, no ornamentation on it, no markings of any kind.
Sounded terrible when I tried to play it.
Of course, when he played it, it was wonderful, and I thought I would upgrade my granddad's banjo for him.
And I was always interested in woodworking and real kinda handy and crafty back then, at the age of like, 13 or 14 years old.
And so, by the time I had worked through all of the various challenges of bending rims and carving necks and fitting it together, three years had gone by, I think, and my granddad had already checked out, he never got that banjo.
But.
- [Charles] That's a shame.
- Yeah, but that's how I, I really enjoyed the process of figuring out how to do things like bend rims, how to cut angles and stuff like that.
The rims, of course, they're gonna start off as a piece of wood, like this.
Those are all stacks of future rim material there.
I'm steam bending some rims right now, and we'll twist some of those up here in a minute.
But basically, we'll take 'em out of the steam bender, and they're gonna be round like this, and we're gonna take 'em and then put 'em into that glue up form and put glue on 'em.
And I use a wedge, it's kind of a medieval process, but between using wedges and pie shaped cauls, I'll laminate 'em all together and glue 'em up.
Then I'm gonna take 'em out of the form after I've glued 'em up, and this is what they're gonna look like.
And I put these over here because I may be using 'em with these block forms.
This is my bending form right here.
So, I get these gloves on.
So I'm gonna take a hot rim out of my simple steam box, very basic construction, works well.
Hooked up to a wallpaper steamer.
(steamer bubbles) I believe this one is Osage.
I'll write the length of it on here, so that when it comes to putting 'em in the form, I'll know.
And I put the bevel up, I'll insert this like so.
And then, keepin' a downward pressure, so that the pressure is acting straight down, not at an angle, and then it'll wanna slip out of this notch that I've made, so that's what I use these for.
And as you can see, when they're hot like this, they're pretty pliable.
So I will take this, a couple of clamps on it.
This one did not break, that's good, and then I'm gonna take my gloves off, because I'm gonna put a strap on it so that I can take it off this form.
So, after a little while, I'm gonna take it off of the rim, so it doesn't need to be on the rim, and I don't want it deforming too much into that notch.
So I'll take it off, and it'll just basically be like this and it'll set.
I'm gonna show you how we're going to use this form to laminate the rims.
I'm not going to put any glue on 'em right now.
We're just gonna do a dry fit.
I like to do a dry fit because I can examine the rims and see if everything's fitting together properly, because I don't want any gaps.
So I'm just taking these off of the straps that have been holding 'em roughly to shape.
I write the length of 'em on here, so that I'll know where they go relative to the rim.
This is 3' 2"" long.
This is 3' and .5" long.
So this is the outer rim, this is the middle rim.
- So normally, the laminating is the gluing of the scarf joint.
- The scarf joints and gluing the rims together.
- Okay.
- As well.
This is a very basic, kind of a wedge, with a wedge cut in these pie shaped pieces.
I'll wax this, this is just silicone rubber, and I'll wax 'em, and I'll start off.
I'll put this 3' 2"" one in here first, and we'll just get that.
Of course, it had a little spring back and, so we're gonna just kinda get that positioned in there.
And then I'm gonna come in with little narrower piece, and that is going to go in here.
- [Charles] So it's several pieces?
- [Bill] It takes two days to do this, because I do one piece at a time, and there's three pieces.
So that's gonna go in there like so, and.
- [Charles] And the whole time you're putting glue?
- Yeah, I'll put glue on the inside of the outside face and on the outside of the inside face.
I use a slow set glue because I want all the time I can in getting this stuff positioned.
- Is it a protein glue or?
- It's, well, it's a tight bond, just a tight bond, slow set glue.
- Okay.
- And then, I'll put a little, the rubber pieces in there, that will help distribute the pressure more evenly.
And I've got them kind of numbered where they go, so these are just gonna kinda fit in here like so.
And let me grab this piece off the floor.
- [Charles] They've all got this little bevel that matches that on the insides, so if you put it in upside down, it doesn't work.
- That's right (both laugh).
And that's why we have this big old hammer here.
And sometimes what I'm gonna need to do, sometimes what I have to do is I put, temporarily, we'll put a clamp on some of these.
("Woodshop Rag" resumes) So I've got my pie shaped cauls in there and I've got this.
(hammer bangs) So what that does then that's going to expand.
It exerts pressure all around, and if it's done right, you're gonna wind up with a nicely laminated rim with no gaps.
And I'll reduce the size of those cauls with the next rim.
I'll use the next site with the next layer.
And there's a few other things I do as far as making sure they're aligned, and everything is kind of jig dependent around here when it comes to building banjos.
So this thing's just gonna kinda fit into here, like so.
I'm gonna clamp this down, and then, very simple process to just.
(saw whirs) So I'm gonna do that to both sides of these, and the end result is that we have a perfectly matched octagon that will then be glued to the top of the rim that we just made.
So I've trimmed off a lot of the excess on this.
So we've got the rim, we've got the tone ring.
In this case, this tone ring is persimmon, another very dense wood.
- [Charles] Sure.
- And then, we're gonna just turn this down flush with the face of the rim.
(file scrapes wood) In the process of turning it, one thing that's very important, and that's to keep the side straight and square with the top.
I'll use a carpenter square.
So I'll just kind of straddle this, and then look at it and look for gaps.
And so right now you can see, it's a little proud on this side, maybe not so much here, and I'll check in a couple places.
So what that's telling me is that this side needs to comb down a little bit.
And with that then, I will use a scraper like this, so that's going to allow me to come in there and then have a nice flat surface and kind of shave it down a little bit, come back, check it again, and just keep doing that until I get it square.
And then ultimately, I'm gonna continue doing this until I can get that tension hoop to fit over the top.
I won't bevel it yet.
That's gonna be one of the last things I do, because I need to drill the holes in there, and it's so much easier to work with it in this form.
And I use jigs to drill the holes actually on the lathe.
This a neck blank, cherry, curly cherry, laminated.
I like to laminate 'em.
I have a truss rod that I'll put in here.
This is just kinda to show you.
I'll put the truss rod in, and I'll put the fretboard on, and often, put the heel cap on.
But right now, I've got to fit a neck that is going to be at a two degree angle off horizon and a two degree angle off center, because a banjo neck is not symmetrical.
It has a 5th string, approximately four frets down, you know, midway.
- [Charles] That kind of gums it up.
- Yeah, the center line is something goofy.
It's the middle of four strings up on the third.
Ultimately, the center line is the third string of a five string banjo, but because there's only four strings at the top, it's gotta be off center.
So, gotta make a jig for that.
So this particular jig has, and this is right now taped down, but basically, this is canted at a slight angle.
And then this wedge is to give the, to give you the angle off of level plane.
- The two degrees.
- The two degrees.
So you've got, this is at an angle, this is at an angle, this is a compound angle, two different degrees.
So, very simple, I'm just gonna kinda hold that thing in there.
I've routed a template that I clamp down to the band saw.
This kind of fits with the template, and we'll just cut the heel real quick.
(saw whirs) So, that's gonna give me this angled cut, but we're not through with this.
- [Charles] Okay.
- I have a corresponding template on the sander, and I'll do the same thing with the sander, and the sander's gonna smooth this out.
We're still not done with cuttin' that heel because the tension ring has to fit down into that.
To cutting the end of the neck blank, I'm going to install a truss rod into the neck blank.
These knobs will be under the first fret and the 17th fret.
Rout out 1/4" channel, drill hole for the knob.
This is gonna recess in there.
I'm gonna put a 1/4" strip of wood in there, completely encapsulate it within the neck, except these two will be at the very end.
I'll sand it all flush again, and then I'll glue the fretboard on, and then we'll cut it on the heel radius jig.
That's a very narrow curved blade, fine tooth.
- [Charles] It is.
- And I have a jig that I made that has a little pin in it, and so what I have, I have templates here.
This is a store-bought template here, one side's a Mastertone, Mastertone fret spacing.
The other side is for a mandolin.
The ebony will basically be double stick taped to this, so that's gonna be attached to the template.
Now, the template is going to, I got everything on orders around here.
It's gonna register on that pin, where that pin is, so this will be stuck on here a little ahead of that.
I'll be able to come through here and just zip, and then I'll move it to the next pin.
Do it again.
- [Charles] I see.
- [Bill] And I'll just work my way down until I've cut the fret slots in there.
And then we'll put the frets in.
- Well, what's next?
- Well, from there, so we've got the neck, and it's still in square form.
It's easy to work with.
I wanna keep it in that shape as long as I can.
The shaping of the neck is the very last thing, but as long as it's in that nice stable square form, then I will go and do a little inlaying on it.
And I'll also cut the angle for the peg head, and at that time then, I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna do the peg head and I'm gonna do the inlay while it's still square.
- Yeah, 'cause you have references.
- Yeah, yeah, it's easy, it's stable.
I can clamp it in there, my little router and everything will just fit on top, and I can just cut down.
- One of the keys to woodworking is keeping your square references as long as possible.
Because after that, who knows?
- Yeah.
This is a lot of fun too, I tell you.
That's why I make these things because they are so fun.
So, I've got a lotta things kinda going on here.
We've got the peg heads that we need to make.
So over the years, I've come up with different templates for the peg heads, and so often I will, I won't do any kind of border or anything on the peg head, but occasionally I will, where I'll get a piece of wood, and I'll have a special template that I'll use with a small router to kinda rout a border out.
And then I'll fill that with some casting resin, like the peg head on this banjo's done.
And so, you got that nice little border around it, that is just cast resin.
But, I don't do that too much, but when I do it, I'll do that sort of thing.
And I've been using more and more of this reconstituted stone product, which they manufacture in like 50, 60 thousandths of an inch thick to match the thickness of the pearl.
And with that, I have a very small router base, so if I'm cutting a piece of inlay.
- [Charles] So that's the depth gauge there.
- Yeah, so I'm gonna put that thing in there.
Well, I'm gonna put my tool in there, and then I'm gonna drop it all the way down and lock it.
And then I'm going to come in here and put my piece of pearl in there, press it down, lock it, take it out, and then all of my cuts will be the correct depth for the pearl.
These are the size bits that I use for this, everything from a 3/64 up to 1/8".
And as far as cutting the pearl itself, I'll often sketch out a design, like a lotta nature scenes and things like that.
So I'll sketch that out on sketch paper, and I'll glue that sketch paper onto the pearl blank.
And then, I'll use a little fine jeweler saw with like a 60 tooth per inch blade on it, and I'll just sit here and cut that thing out.
I'll use some files to kinda clean it up, and then I'll transfer that to the ebony.
I'll transfer the shape of it.
So what I do, I have white transfer paper for ebony, so I'll put the white transfer paper down on the ebony, I'll put the pearl blank on there.
I'll use a scribe, and I'll scribe around it to transfer the image, and then I'll rout it out and I will, I've glued it into place using both epoxy and superglue.
I tend to, I'm gettin' more used to using superglue, not superglue, but CA glue, and I have some very fine black powder that I'll kind of pour on there and then rub it out and put a little CA glue on there, sand it smooth, and you can't see any seams.
Without doing it, then there'd be gaps and all kinds of stuff.
- [Charles] That's wonderful.
- But using that little bit of black powder kind of fixes the imperfections in it all, so.
- So there are all kinds of woodworking that goes into a banjo, plus you have the hardware and heads and everything else.
Do you wanna go pick some?
- Sure, let's do it.
- I brought a mandolin.
We can see, we might get run off.
(Bill laughs) (Bill, Charles, and female play mandolins and banjo) Well that's it for this episode of the "Volunteer Woodworker."
Join us next time, and we'll tell you another story.
("Woodshop Rag" plays) - [Announcer] "Volunteer Woodworker" is funded in part by, since 1970, Whiteside Machine Company has been producing industrial grade router bits in Claremont, North Carolina.
Whiteside makes carbide bits for edge forming, grooving, and CNC applications.
Learn more at whitesiderouterbits.com.
Real Milk Paint Company makes VOC-free non-toxic milk paint available in 56 colors.
Milk paint creates a matte wood finish that can be distressed for an antique look.
Good Wood Nashville designs custom furniture and is a supplier of vintage hardwoods.
Keri Price with Keller Williams Realty has been assisting Middle Tennessee home buyers and sellers since 2013.
Mayfield Hardwood Lumber, supplying Appalachian hardwoods worldwide.
Anna's Creative Lens, crafters of resin on wood decorative arts.
Visit CharlesBrockchairmaker.com for all you need to know about woodworking.
If you'd like to learn even more, free classes in a variety of subjects are available for streaming from CharlesBrockchairmaker.com.
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