Has anyone experimented with different wood for rims? What effect would a cedar, hickory, or oak rim have?
A lot of the tonal changes can be predicted based on the hardness of the wood. You can look up wood hardness databases based on the Janka scale.
In general, harder wood is going to absorb less of the vibration of the tone ring, leading to a brighter sound with more sustain and overtones.
Deering has a whole line of open back and resonator banjos built of white oak. The White Lotus resonator model is essentially an Eagle II in oak with no tone ring. Since it's a rim shoe banjo, this model can be played both open back and resonator.
Stelling at various times used 12-ply beech rims and birch block rims.
Search the archives here and I'm sure you'll find long ago discussions in which the dearly missed Ken LeVan wrote about all sorts of alternative woods he experimented with.
Thanks
Here's four different rims with the same neck and hardware: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~politzer/rims/rims.pdf -- and 28 pages of blah, blah, blah trying to make sense of it. Pages 24 and 25 have links to sound files of actual tunes.
A simple but not the least obvious argument is given for why thin rims actually work pretty well. Weight and stiffness are clearly the relevant parameters. Different kinds of wood using the same design and construction give another way to access a range of those parameters.
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