I've been working with a banjo that was given to me for free by
a guy at our local senior citizens center. He recognized it for
what it was...(mostly junk) I tuned it and tried it and it sounded just like it looked.
Since I've always wanted to try my hand at tinkering with a banjo to
learn a bit about setup I decided to try with this one. Its a "Kent" banjo
all aluminum pot with a painted neck and some falling apart tuners
and the frets are in terrible shape kind of filed here and there. I decided if it went completely A T H
I'd just chalk it up to a learning experience and trash it.
I proceeded slowly and disassembled it and gave it a good cleaning and
painted the pot with spray paint a flat black I installed some quilting hoops inside the rim
as per a thread on here about improving these POS banjos. Next I sprayed the head with Kilz.
I removed all the old finish from the neck and found some decent looking mahogany (I think)
I applied some minwax wood finish, added some tuners from my junk box and re fretted it.
strung it up and test drove it...and WOW...its a decent sounding banjo now
I took it to the jam and showed it to the guy who gave it to me and he liked it .
he took it and played it and bragged on it to some folks
well I learned a lot from this old banjo and Mostly I learned all things are related
If you change one thing it affects everything. These old banjos have a purpose
they patiently let us fumble with them till we learn something. I like the banjo now and I play it
and sometimes i think it smiles at me and says "Thanks for the new lease on life"
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