MIMF

Wow, time flies when yer having fun! Congratulations to the team!

(sigh) I was wrong... shooting for Autumn 2021 now (moving across the country this spring)

OK, it wasn't 2018, nor 2019... but I'm PRETTY SURE its going to get done this autumn

Wow, two and a half years have passed and I still haven't cleared the bench for this! I guess the woods are getting more and more seasoned! Have ALL the hardware ready, and neck and fretboard and body woods, AND also have an MDF routing template of the body outline (cut for me by a CNC company in NY...

So that's the world I was born into...

That switch improv is very clever, - elegant even!!

Well... laziness ("the mother of invention") got the best of me, so I decided to give this project the "clamshell" configuration, two thick slabs of Western Red Cedar sandwiched together and extensively hollowed out inside. (before joining!) Probably with carved out "integra...

I have a commercial one here, and its 35mm @ nut and 43mm @12th fret...

is that balanced, or single-ended?

now with a seven-inch resonator cone... side views still very much work-in-progress

OK... a bit of research has cleared that up.... I see it's a trade-off between the string energy being dissipated all at first attack... or sustaining longer, albeit softer. Higher impedance soundboard keeps the energy in the string longer, etc. Complicated stuff! Looks like this is fast morphing in...

Well, perhaps we can look at the opposite side of the equation. What is it about a banjo that actually REDUCES the sustain of the string? I think that pesky 'conservation of energy' law rules out the string vibration (once set in motion by a pluck of finger or plectrum) ever INCREASING. So it's not ...

So, what do we need for 'loud' with long sustain???

Wow, I was passing through a nearby city today and stopped in at a music store with a very well equipped acoustic room. Played a bunch of guitars, mandolas, banjos, banjolins. ukes, resonators, ect. Surprisingly, the loudest and richest instrument in the whole room was an open-backed five string ban...

Yes, you are right, that would be a lot easier... But any way I choose to do a "rim" - it's still going to have the obvious visible "banding". So I'll have to mock that up and see if I like it. Today I was thinking that instead of a one-wood "rim", I could build up a ri...

Still undecided! But I got my rough-cut cello neck in the mail today... :-) Photo4894.jpg Will dowel those peg-holes, and do some sort of veneer over top! It's really dry maple, and has a lovely ringy-pingy tap tone. Now I've had a chance to take some measurements, been back to work on the blueprint...

Today I am leaning towards some sort of very tight "basket-weave" to create back and sides. With some glued in linen linings, perhaps.

Anybody here been doing that sort of thing?

That's an interesting idea - I could borrow a heat gun from my office... But it still begs the question of "how to make the sides"? I still feel that there must be some really clever 'mathematical arrangement of interlocked pieces' Solution waiting to reveal itself. The suggestion of "...

3D printing is an awesome idea, and I do have Solidworks at the office, so could generate the file without too much difficulty. HOWEVER, it might be too expensive, since I do not own or have access to a 3D printer, and I'd have to farm it out to some 3D printing service. But hey, plastic worked for ...

Why so deep? Good question! It's only my intuitive response... I don't have any scientific basis. But in my mind's eye I am visualizing a deeper body, sort of proportional to a bowlback mando. As for any practical reason, I might be tempted to hypothesize that a more substantial "hefty" bo...