Made the shoes.
Burr in the router to shape them, using a handle screwed in. I thought it was neat the way the brass shavings moved to the nodes on the table surface, like that one plate experiment thing.
Other shaping was done with a file. Here i'm putting a slight concavity into the side that sits against the banjo rim, just so they don't rock about.
They're pretty mangled and all sorts of different dimensions. For the amount of work it took I feel I probably could've done better. But they'll still do. The shoes on two other old banjos I own are similarly misshapen, and I can only assume they were made in a similarly stupid way. If I had the time I would've tried lost was casting them
Also fit the neck to the pot.
Drilled some mounting holes. The idea is that i'll make a kind of nut that fits in the larger hole in the base, I think they call them barrel nuts. Perhaps could've done it in a more 'invisible' way but I just forgot to drill the hole before sticking the fingerboard on.
Sanded the heel fit. Hopefully got it close enough but it shouldn't be too difficult to adjust it. You can see the oak 'clamp brackets' in this picture; the pine ones snapped almost immediately.
For the tension band I tried ring rolling it. It's 5mm thick 304 stainless and this piddly ring roller wasn't at all fit for the task.
Plan B is to bend it around a form, since I want the curve to be fairly even but don't want to go wild trying to make a stout ring roller. That's a project in itself.
Anyways this 'form' was an offcut from making the heel sanding setup, it's 267mm and the steel after bending it to that sprung back to 365mm. I might be wrong, but i'd assume that if I worked out the percentage springback I could make another form the same percentage smaller than the final diameter and bend it to that. It's some simple damn maths but i'm not really in the mood to do any heavy thinking at the minute.
Bit disappointed about the ring roller since I was hoping to get the holes stuck in around the rim, but I wanted to know how high I should make them to fit the hooks on right, which required the tension hoop to be made. No such thing as a quick job...
Oh yeah, i'm also wondering if there's any sort of clever graphic to put on the peghead. It's not really necessary but I'd still like to stick something there. Can't think of anything that wouldn't either be boring (like my name) or get old fast.
