Homemade Cookie Tin Banjo, part 7

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My cookie tin is 203 mm in diameter (8 inches), quite a bit smaller than your typical commercial banjo drumhead, so I am making some kind of a tenor banjo here.

I measured several guitars and looked especially at a smaller guitar I have. I bought it for a daughter who was fairly small, but she never loved it, because it flat doesn't sound very good. Instead, she liked my nice Woodbine and borrowed it so much that I finallly just gave it to her. Leaving me with the small 3/4 size guitar which, like a stuffy society lady, looks good but isn't really capable of much. At any rate, the string length, bridge to nut, on your typical classical guitar is about 25.5 inches. This little guitar has 23 inches there. So for my banjo I settled on a string length of 24 inches or 610 mm.

But I have big fingers. I don't even like to play American-style steel-stringed guitars - neck too narrow, strings too close together. My favorite guitar is a cheap classical model that wouldn't even play when I got it - I had to saw off the neck and bolt it on better - and I put metal strings on it which gives a very nice sound and the wide neck is easy to play. I don't know why they make guitar necks so narrow when the flamenco artists have demonstrated conclusively that wider is better, but I'm not about to perpetuate the same kind of narrow constriction on this banjo. I measured the string dimensions on that perfect guitar and laid them out in my plan for this. The guitar strings are 8.5 mm apart, based on a total of 42 or 43 mm for six (five spaces). You can measure things very, very accurately by taking several measurements in several different ways and averaging. The neck is 50.8 mm across at the nut.

Here let me say that I don't like this nutty terminology. Parts of the guitar or banjo are named by comparison to the body of a person or animal; the head at the top, neck, body, and tail are all named on this plan. Then we have the little bar between head and neck, the strings pass over it. Why would this be called the "nut"? Someone didn't know their anatomy...

From now on, I'm going to call this thing the Grin, whether on a guitar, banjo, violin, etc. Because it's often made of a white material like ivory, and it has divisions so it looks like a set of teeth on someone grinning.

Importing then the separation of 8.5 mm string to string gives a neck width of 34 mm at the grin (four strings, and same margin outside them) and 42.5 mm at the cookie-tin end of the neck (five strings). I laid these dimensions out on my oak plank.

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