Gourd Banjo for Sale!….my pricing defined

Here she is, the first of many for the year 2012. This is a home-grown gourd. I am proud to say it looks like I will be building at least ten more gourd banjos in the coming months with the gourds I grew over the summer. I learned a lot about growing gourds this season and I can’t wait to give it another go this spring.

I feel like I have finally reached the point where I think, hear, feel and see that my banjos are worth something. People say I have been underselling myself for a long time. I have always offered my banjos at a very low price. I think I sold them for what they were truly worth, but sure, maybe I could have gotten more for them. That is not the point to me. I want to price these banjos at what I think they are worth, or in other words, what I would be willing to pay for them. My work has greatly increased in quality over the years and I have learned a lot about acoustics and woodworking. I have never sold an instrument that I was not proud of, but now there is no doubt in my mind that my banjos are of a high quality.

Phew, that was kinda long…I’m asking for $399 for these gourd banjos now. That is because they are worth it. They are still some of the cheapest handmade banjos on the market. This is a very fair price, though it is a good chunk of change.

The neck is solid walnut. Bone nut. Handmade walnut tuning pegs. Goatskin head. Nylon strings. Leather tailpiece.

Send me a message or email at carverbanjos@gmail.com if you are interested!

Banjos are on the way

I finally graduated from college and now its time for a job. But in the meantime, I’ll be building banjos to help out. I have made a lot of progress on some projects this week. A frame banjo is done (see video), I’ve lowered the price on the travel banjo to $150 shipped (see travel banjo post on this page), I’ve got a gourd banjo that will be done this week, a mountain banjo will be next, followed by my crazy inlay minstrel banjo. Did you get all of that? Email me at carverbanjos@gmail.com if you want one!

Gourd banjos are coming back

Well, I’m back. I can’t stay away from banjos for long. I took a break from building banjos the past few months. I got a real paying job for the remainder of my summer, then it was back to school. But I did manage to grow a great crop of promising gourds. There are about 25 beautiful full-sized and perfectly round gourds drying in the backyard. They will be dry to use in the coming months. I can’t wait to get started! Keep an eye on this blog, I’ll have a ton of gourd banjos for sale this early spring. This is a picture I took with my cellphone. Hard to tell but there were a handful of gigantic moths pollinating the flowers. These moths were amazing. They looked/moved exactly like humming birds except had an obvious moth-head, with a wing-span of 4-5 inches.

The elusive gourd banjo

Everybody wants one, nobody has one. I don’t make too many of these, but when I have them they sell fast! You really can’t beat the look or sound of a banjo that basically grew out of the ground. This is a true banjo. Check it out on banjohangout.

I’ll be posting a youtube video of it in action soon.

Buy This Travel Banjo!

This is a neat little banjo. I have it tuned to the key of C. It has a walnut neck and a pine pot. It barks. That is the best way I can describe the sound in one word. I packaged it up several months ago and it has been living in a wooden box ever since. It needs a home. I am asking for $200 shipped, but make me a reasonable offer and I will not refuse!

New Month, New Models

I built banjos like crazy last month. I spent a lot of money on supplies. I knew it would be kind of slow just trying to sell all of them. The sales have finally started to pick up, so this month I want to build at a rate the market can keep up with. My goal is to build two to three per week and sell at least two per week.

The new models: I have some plans to build a tackhead with two extra thumb strings at the 7th and 10th fret position. I did this before with a gourd banjo, and it worked out nicely. There may still be a video floating around out there of it in action. I also want to get a few gourd banjos done this month. I have one usable gourd at the moment. I live in Indiana and I can’t find any gourds!? I might have to start buying them off ebay.

Keep an eye out for these new banjos! I’m also still working on a few walnut mountain models.

This Banjo Haunts Me.

A friend cut down a crab-apple tree in fall of 2008. He gave me a few chunks of the wood. I put it away in my garage to dry. I had been wanting to do some crazy banjo with all kinds of inlay and carvings for awhile. I thought about what I wanted for almost a year as I waited for the branches to dry out.

Spring 2009 I had a rough idea of what I wanted and the wood was dry. I knew it was going to be a nice hard wood, and it was. It dried out nicely. It had a pleasant smell when I cut into it with my bandsaw. To describe the wood…well, it is like an apple made solid. Same whitish color, same texture in appearance. It’s very dense, with a super tight grain.

I’ve been working on this banjo for nearly two years. The project always gets pushed into the background as other banjo orders come in. This banjo was numbered at 44, I’ve finished over 20 other banjos since.  Every time I work on it I think of something else I would like to add or change or fix.

We are in the home stretch now. I’ve spent a lot of time carving the heel and preparing the body for sanding. I want to get this thing finished. I’d like to sell it. Anyone interested?

I want to inset a brass band around the outside of the pot. It will have all brass hardware and real gut strings. I can’t wait to play it.

Mountain banjo complete. $350 plus $25 shipping

I just strung up this beautiful mountain banjo today. It took me a bit longer to get done than I planned, but the extra time put in really shows. The hand-rubbed oil finish is flawless. The grain pops and shines. I went with an old Gibson style for the peghead as opposed to my traditional peghead design.

It doesn’t get any better than this. This banjo is top of the line. It plays like a dream and sounds awesome. If you’ve never played a fretless banjo you need to play this one.  I will include two different sized bridges so you can adjust for humidity changes.

Check it out on banjohangout: http://www.banjohangout.org/classified/22171

-solid walnut

-bone nut

-brass hardware

-steel strings

-frailing scoop

-goat skin head

-my own special simplified pot design

-100% handmade, including the pegs, bridge and nut

Silver Dust in the Grain

Hand-sanding is slow work, especially on a hardwood. I hand sand all of my banjos. Electric sanders work great but I feel like they don’t allow me the control I need over the grain.

My dad gave me a small chunk of silver a while ago and I’ve been trying to figure out how to create a fine enough dust to rub into the grain. I don’t know enough about the process yet to get any real results. I sprinkled a little bit over the fingerboard of one of the mountain banjos today, and tried to rub it into the grain. I couldn’t tell if any of it set in.

This piece is one of the best examples I could find on the web. Silver dust is an awesome finishing touch. I’m going to keep experimenting until I get what I’m looking for. It would certainly help set Carver banjos apart from the rest.

Over the years…

I started building banjos when I was sixteen years old. I felt like they were decent enough to sell by the time I was seventeen. I’m nearly 23 now and I’ve been building ever since. I’ve now sold over 60 banjos and probably built close to 75.

Here is the workshop. Its the messy back half of my parent’s garage. The only electric tools I use are a bandsaw, table belt sander, drill press, hand router, and a handheld jig saw. They are all I need. You can have all the fancy equipment you want but what good is it if you don’t need it? I use a few hand tools as well: a 1″ chisel, a few files and rasps, and sand paper.

I dug two of my first banjos out of my closet today. I robbed the skin and strings off of them years ago.

Wow, let me tell you, these things are rough. Yes, that black thing is a frying pan. I had a piece of plywood on top as a soundboard. Surprisingly, this thing played nice, even with the paperclip wire frets. The other banjo was a tackhead, but the skin was droopy and the tacks cracked the flimsy pot in many places. I played both of these a lot, but I knew they weren’t the best. The necks were cut out of old 2×4′s with a hand saw and then shaped with a bench grinder.

I’ve always made my own pegs, but I’ve really come a long way in the past three or four years. It took me years to develop the peg blank that I use now. They kind of  slowly evolved over time into something I am quite pleased with.  I start with a blank that is the general shape of the peg then turn it down on the side of my belt sander. It used to take me nearly an hour to make five pegs. Now, I can crank out about 20 in the same time.

I’m always improving my banjo designs. Who knows how different they will be in five years?