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| Tone Ring Alchemist |
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Along the way we would sit for hours sometimes. We would be in my living room taking banjos apart and putting them together. Building in different loadings and stress loads, finding out what helped and what hindered a banjo's performance. Building stresses into the pot with the coordinator rod. We found out that that is a real "No-no" with this kind of tone ring.
What we like is a typically round shell. We measured the inside with a ruler to keep them within 1/16th of an inch in roundness and I like to be able to take the tone rings on and off by hand with little-to-no difficulty. You can lift them out, but I don't want them loose. These are just little se-up things. The neck has to be a good fit, tight. The tail piece has to be down on the stretcher band and has to be anchored on. This is especially true if it is a Presto type tailpiece to begin with. I am talking basically abut the Gibson style of banjos.
Some people are concerned about using the coordinator rods on their banjos. Once you get your pot set up straight, then you can adjust your string height with banjo bridges, not with coordinator rods, which I think have created difficulties for many people. I made up a whole bunch of maple bridges with some wood that came from and old piano that was built before the Civil War (talk about a pre-war bridge!) They worked out great -- Janet Davis has been selling them. The point is that we made them in different heights so that you could adjust your string height with your bridge once you got your pot set up straight because that is going to be the crux of the sound situation. this is going to solve problems for people who have found that the coordinator rods have created difficulties for them.
I want to mention too, another problem with older banjos -- namely their cost! 8 or 10 or 12 thousand for the cost of one of these supposed replicas is a lot of money for a banjo that is, in all probability, not an original anything -- unless you get lucky. Most of them have repro necks.
