R Buck - Posted - 02/25/2009:  06:44:43

Last night, much to my chagrin, one of my band mates picked up my fretless banjo and saw a tear in the head. I had left it out of the case and the head tightened as they are wont to do during heating season. My fix for this is a a little super glue in the tear. It will try and the head will go on.

It sure beats changing the head and it has held on another banjo for a long time (more than a year).

Anyone else use this technique or have a better idea?

RobBob
Music; the best way to count time.
www.blueridgerounders.com

trapdoor2 - Posted - 02/25/2009:  06:59:19

Baseball stitch?

Actually, IIRC, George Wunderlich talked a bit about repairing vintage skin heads back at AEBG 2006. Basically, he relieves just a bit of tension (you don't want it loose, you just want to reduce the gap so that the edges meet again) and then glues (hide glue) on a layer of thin hide over the tear...basically a patch (and sometimes on both sides). Give it night or two to set and retension (carefully!).

Naturally, a successful repair depends an several factors and in some cases you don't relieve tension at all. Myself, I would only do a repair on a museum piece or to get myself thru a gig. Replacement is the best bet for a 'player'.

===Marc

"If banjos needed tone rings, S.S. Stewart would have made them that way."

R Buck - Posted - 02/25/2009:  08:02:44

I did loosen the head. Super Glue was originally used in the USSR for securing body tissue inside the body where stitches or staples would not be a good thing. I did this last evening and the head is fine today. You could not tell that it was patched if you did not know where it tore.

Hide glue would work too, but this only takes a couple of hours to cure.

RobBob
Music; the best way to count time.
www.blueridgerounders.com

mike gregory - Posted - 02/25/2009:  15:35:29

Only time I repaired a small hole in an ols skin head, I put a patch on the inside.
Used epoxy.
Forgot that Super Glue was ORIGINALLY a medical product.

I'll bear that in mind for IF and WHEN it needs doing.




Thanks for the post.

0 =):{ )
Rev Mike ( Halo added 2-7-09)
Mike Gregory, Banjo Maker Infraordinaire
When I say my instruments are as good as anything Gibson or Martin ever made,
I mean MEL Gibson and DEAN Martin!


My banjos can be seen on my own website
http://littlebanjos.lunare.net

See me & my SQUARED EEL banjo on the Y''all tube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cd-OzXzpfo

Paul Hostetter - Posted - 02/25/2009:  21:47:44

It was not originally a medical product. It was not invented in the USSR.

Cyanoacrylates were invented in 1942 by Dr. Harry Coover of Kodak Laboratories during experiments to make a special extra-clear plastic suitable for gun sights. He found they weren't suitable for that purpose, so he set the formula aside. Six years later he pulled it out of the drawer thinking it might be useful as a new plastic for airplane canopies. Wrong again--but he did find that cyanoacrylates would glue together many materials with incredible strength and quick action, including two very expensive prisms when he tried to test the ocular qualities of the substance. Seeing possibilities for a new adhesive, Kodak developed "Eastman #910" (later "Eastman 910") a few years later as the first true "super glue." In a now-famous demonstration conducted in 1959, Dr. Coover displayed the strength of this new product on the early television show "I've Got a Secret," where he used a single drop placed between two steel cylinders to lift the host of the show, Garry Moore, completely off of the ground.

If you think hide glue would work, I dare you to try it.

Paul Hostetter, luthier
Santa Cruz, California
www.lutherie.net

goldtopia - Posted - 02/25/2009:  23:49:06

It would be better to replace it than to repair it.

Bill.O