There used to be column in Scientific American called "The Amateur Scientist" and one month there was an article about homemade telescopes and observatories. The author had made many pieces of equipment for his observatory and he said that you should draw it out first. If you can draw it you can probably make it. I thought this was a remarkably good idea and I've adopted it and used it many times over the years.
When I started drawing out the design for the neck, a different idea came to me:
The neck could be made in two parts, inside and outside, and bolted together. This means no rectangle need be cut out of the tin, just a small bolt hole drilled.The wood construction looks pretty easy, just some extra blocks glued on. And a hole drilled thru and a bolt put in.
And it puts the internal truss way far away from the vibrating tin face.
It also allows me to slant the neck down (which ought to make the action* a bit better) without having to carve the whole thing out of a fat timber to get this, just need a typical thin plank.
Looking at a few commercial banjos, their necks do slant down slightly so that was apparently a thought others had also.
* Action: distance between strings and fingerboard/frets.
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