Puzzle found this on the internet and wanted to follow it. I thought it seemed like a fun project so I asked to help. The following webpage chronicles our journey.
We drove around town in Puzzle's ailing car. First place we stopped was its parents' house. Joe had a bunch of spare wood lying around. Saša had a bunch of spare food lying around. We gladly accepted both. Next we called the nearest music store. They had a set of salvaged tuners from a junior guitar they said we could have. We chatted with the employees a while, nice folks. Purchased $20 of banjo strings and they threw in the tuners for free.
Neither of us have built an instrument before. We both have a small amount woodworking experience. Myself from public schooling, Puzzle from modifying the house wherein it lives. We started by assessing all the wood we sourced - which ideally we would have done as we were gathering it, but we didn't think of that. We learned that the wood we planned to build the resonating chamber out of was quite warped. We shrugged and hoped for the best. We did that a lot. Then we went ahead and penciled in the shape we would cut for the bottom of the body.
We put tape over where we'd be cutting to hold the thin plywood together and prevent it from splintering and cracking. Or something. Seemed to work well enough. It took us a few minutes to figure out how to cut it, because we wanted to try not using power tools at first. First we tried holding it against the floor, but we quickly decided that was a bad idea. While Puzzle went ahead and clamped it to a table to hack away at it, I quietly looked up hand saw technique on my phone. After much sweating we had our first shape cut out.
We traced over the first shape to cut a similar piece for the top of the body. I think at this point we turned on the power saw. We should have done that sooner. It was around this time a housemate politely requested we stop making so much goddamn noise, so we just sat on the couch touching the wood and yearning for a while.
