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It is the early Spring of 2007, and I have been bitten by the Banjo Building Bug again. The other banjos that I have made were all done from kits, and while there was a lot of work to do on them, the heavy work had already been done for me. This time I want to make the whole banjo myself. If you want to see how I built those kits, just go to my web page, http://www.thekimerers.net/brian/index.shtml and click on the appropriate link.
Because I do not have a real shop with equipment to steam wood or a lathe to turn the rim on, I decided to try building a type of banjo that was made by just plain folk using hand tools. That, of course would be a gourd banjo.
This web page is an accounting of my efforts to build the gourd banjo from scratch, using hand tools like in the old days.
I have shot the photos and written the text for this story as I did the work. My goal was to chronicle what I really had to do in order to build my banjo. I have not skipped over the hard parts to make it look easier than it really was. The web page was not planned out in advance. My mistakes are here as well as my successes. So this web site is a bumpy road and may meander a bit.
Anyway, without further ado, click on [Next] to see how I built this banjo, or click on an entry below if you know which page you want to go to.