That fingerboard looks super cool!

This is one of the best looking banjos I have ever seen.

So beautiful! But the tonal character is amazing as well! Just incredible!

Pretty cool

Nice build!

NICE!

What? It's so beautiful!!! Congratulations!

The banjo looks great, but so do a lot of these shots. The video quality is definitely high.

Really beautiful. Being fretless and having the gourd bowl it reminds me a bit of a shamisen.

Great video I love that finger board

IT'S awesome 👌. Traditionally it makes the part weaker but with epoxy etc. No reason we can't do this more often. Good work

@bengreco

2 ай бұрын

thanks, yeah it probably wasn't the best move to use the softwood yew for the neck, but I couldn't resist. I'm hoping to try this again soon with epoxy, a sturdier neck wood, and maybe even a graphite truss rod

The knots in that yew look fantastic!

Cherish your grandfather

@bengreco

2 ай бұрын

definitely do, miss living close by

@elbowache

2 ай бұрын

@bengreco beautiful instrument- beautiful film

Your work is soooo beautiful !

Your banjos and videos are so incredibly cool!

Have you thought of making other gourd instruments a gourd morin khuur would be pretty cool :)

Absolutely brilliant Ben! Thanks for sharing!

The Yew looks great, my main concern if I were building this, is that the end grain will probably shrink with time and crack, even though it is glued to the neck.

@bengreco

2 ай бұрын

yeah definitely a concern. I'll be monitoring it for while to see what happens. There was some movement after the glueup, but none since I flattened the fingerboard about a month ago. I suspect as it gets drier over the summer that I'll see some shrinking

Beautiful banjo Ben, thanks for the vid.

georgeous

cool job

Very pretty build but I can't imagine that will last long. The typical reason that quarter sawn or rift sawn wood is used for fingerboards and necks is stability. Fingerboards are usually made of extremely dense and stable woods, because they need to stay as flat as possibly over time. You want the lignin running consistently down the length of the piece of wood, to make it more resistant to warping over time. Using the end grain like this, is very nice looking, but much less stable. On a fretless banjo, it might matter slightly less, especially depending on the action height. Over time though, you can expect it to warp *A LOT* more than a fingerboard cut normally. Especially when compounded with the epoxy, which is also highly unstable depending on the humidity and temperature.

@bengreco

2 ай бұрын

Yeah I'm very curious to watch this over the next several months and see how it responds to the summer dryness. This fingerboard did warp pretty bad after the glue-up, it cupped up on the ends, but since I sanded it back level there hasn't been much movement. Probably wouldn't ever try this with frets. This was pretty experimental, I have a couple more of these end grain blanks and I wanna try to soak one with thin epoxy and sort of plastify it. I like the look so much, I really wanna figure out how to make it more feasible.

@N8Dulcimer

2 ай бұрын

@@bengreco It came out pretty nice looking. I would think if you could find a super stable, well seasoned, quarter sawn piece of wood to use as the neck, and glue on a real thin slice of that end grain wood and seal it in, then the whole fretboard will have less free will of its own to try and warp.

Hey man, nice build. Look at Dionguitar he did a ironwood endgrain fingerboard in 2021. There is also bondinstrument who did a banksia nut fretboard.

@bengreco

2 ай бұрын

thanks, wow yeah those are awesome, gotta change my clickbait title now haha

sick fopodi shirt

@bengreco

2 ай бұрын

hell yeah

That is gorgeous. I love your channel, but I also kind of hate watching your videos because I would love to have an instrument made by you, but because of the time and detail you put into them, I’m afraid it would break my heart a little to hear the price. I’m positive it would be more than fair, and I hope it’s not offensive to talk about, I just don’t have money and I’d be worried about shipping, both cost and safety of the instrument. So I guess I’ll have to be happy watching and dreaming.

@clacclackerson3678

2 ай бұрын

Ha, exactly the same here. And I'm in Sydney, I'd be scared it wouldn't survive the journey.

@banjomango145

2 ай бұрын

hey dewey, im a gourd banjo builder in europe, where you located? maybe if its another europian country shipping would be alot less

@bengreco

2 ай бұрын

I gat that haha, I originally starter making gourd banjos bc I really wanted one but couldn't afford it. I usually sell them in the 500-700 range, which is on par with some other builders and about as low as I can get it without bankrupting myself. I always encourage people to take a crack at building their own though, it can be done with hardly any tools and gourd banjos originated as a homemade instrument

@bengreco

2 ай бұрын

I've shipped to Europe a couple times and the banjos survived unscathed, the thing that gets you is the import tariffs. Not sure about Australia, but in Europe it adds over $100 on top of already steep shipping

@solenum1

2 ай бұрын

@@bengreco Probably a bit of an ask, but I think a long-winded video guide on building a gourd banjo at home with just basic tools you'd expect anyone to typically have lying around would be fantastic. I think we all want to give it a shot at some point but don't know where to start having only basic hand tools and little to no woodworking experience. Unfortunately most people in England and a lot of Europe don't generally have access to power tools/more advanced woodworking tools because there's rarely a need for someone to buy them given the high cost and how little they'd use them (combined with the fact that most of us don't have the space either, garages and basements are extremely uncommon here for example), and we don't really have any publicly accessible ones around either, so I think most of us are stuck with hand saws and such.

interesting concept with the end grain fingerboard. That came out beautifully, nice work Ben!

@kylewood4852

2 ай бұрын

I like your rendition of washington blues too!

@bengreco

2 ай бұрын

thanks, one of my favorite songs! I've seen you nail that one on a fretless before, it's tough haha