I want to build a guitar, with a resonator built from skin, and have a saddle resting on it. This would be inserted into the build, not the whole top. I.E. the skin wrapped around a small stitching frame. I am curious what the best way to attach the skin is, to get tautness, and durability?
Thanks.
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Hi Colin,
This has gotten to be a pretty interesting discussion, but too bad it is outside of the CBN's banjo discussion group. Not to worry, though. I put a blurb and a link in that group so they can easily find this thread. The banjo group is called "Banjo Players Unite!". The group is evolving into a banjo builders group.
-Rand.
P.S. Sorry for thinking you were from the U.K., Colin. So, you are in luck when it comes to free Tyvek courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service.
Hi Colin,
You might try stretching it (your Tyvek head material) the best you can while tacking opposite ends (as you work your way around the drum) with strong tacks, the kind they use to tack upholstery onto furniture. (Maybe they call them "upholstery tacks"?) Getting the even stretch all across the drum will be the hard part. Rpeek was using banjo hardware that makes tensioning the head a lot easier. I seem to recall he used two layers of Tyvek. He mentioned it in one of his other videos about building a postage envelop banjo.
I have a Chinese made Qinqin ("chinchin") that looks like a banjo, a circular body made of wood and a small drum head (made of cast iron with sheep skin spread across it). The drum just sits in a well and it has no tensioning mechanism. The instrument sounds pretty nice, more mellow than a banjo, due to the wood. You may have similar results adding a drum to a wooded cigar box. The problem with my Qinqin is that the fretting used some odd-ball spacing that looked diatonic, but wasn't. So I pulled off the original frets and plan to re-fret it some day. In the meantime I got involved in CBG building. Well, some day I might get back to fixing my Qinqin.
Oh that reminds me. In the old days banjo players didn't have all this fancy tensioning hardware, so what they did when the humidity changed and the head began to sag was to remove the current bridge and put in a slightly taller one. That might do it. The combination of a taller bridge with string tension might be the mechanism you can use to add the final tension you need to the drum head. Fortunately, Tyvek doesn't stretch with changes in humidity (at least I haven't heard that it does).
Actually it all boils down to string tension. The bridge should be tall enough to give your head the extra tension it needs without raising the strings so far off the head that you loose good action (i.e. the strings aren't so far off the fretboard that you can easily fret them).
Hope this helps.
-Rand.
I was thinking if you have your drum hoop, and can find a narrow strip of veneer (wood), then you could use a very thin drill bit to pre-drill the holes through the drum hoop and the veneer "ring". This would make it easier to hammer in the tacks. I was also thinking that if you went around in either a clock-wise or counter-clockwise direction, tacking opposite ends that eventually you would end up with a bunch of excess material that you can't tack down. I think a better strategy would be to tack it in a way similar to tightening down the lugs when changing a tire on your car.
That is, do one tack and then do the opposite side. Then choose the next position to be 90 degrees to the line you just tacked down and tack this line down, then do the line at 45 degrees, and then the opposite line at 45 degrees, and then do the four 22.5 degree lines. That's 8 tacks. Maybe 16 would do a better job. On modern banjos they usually have between 18 and 24 "hold downs" or whatever they call them do-ma-jiggies. Here's a diagram for the tacking pattern I'm suggesting...
Using a few temporary tacks to keep the "skin" pretty much in place is a good idea. Then, as you tack them in for real, you can undo the temporary tacks.
The knitting loop sounds a little weak to me. Maybe if you could fashion two of them together, perhaps gluing one to the inside of the other (may require cutting open the inner hoop and shortening it a bit so that it can fit inside the outer hoop).
As a goal, tighten it as tight as you can by hand. When you add strings and the bridge, tuning the string will tighten the drum further. The drum will sound best at optimal tension, so do the old tap test. If it sounds dull, increase tension and tap again. If you get it right the tapping should sound pretty bright. I don't really know what happens when it's overly tight. Maybe the skin pullls free from the tacks.
We should invite some drum builders to the group.
-Rand.
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