John Ashby’s Lady of the Lake

Well, sometimes you just have to do things over again…# 174’s neck ended up bowing quite considerably under string tension, more than I anticipated, thinking the ash was fairly stable, all along thinking a one-piece neck is ok, but two or three is better. While adding an aluminum strip through the back of the neck and a walnut one over that to help stiffen it, it still bowed after a while, so I decided just to re-do the neck, cutting of the front portions (peghead overlay and fingerboard) of the old neck and doing this time a two-piece neck (from the same piece as the previous neck, split down the middle and one half rotated, with grain opposing) with a walnut center strip. Even with this arrangement there was still some flex, so I then added a steel rectangular rod underneath the fingerboard inlaid in the center strip before gluing the fingerboard on (after sanding the bottom, and then once glued, I ended up pulling the frets and leveling the top). I also angled the neck a little more than the previous and did a different set up with the dowel hardware instead of the wedge method, using a hex shoe mounted to the dowel and threading the tension hook hole for another bolt to draw the heel and rim together (similar to older banjos I’ve seen, I think Bay State or Cole?).

I learned this tune at a recent jam. I had recorded a video of it in C in the shop, but wasn’t quite happy with it (a bit of interpreting a part was a little off, after listening to John Ashby’s recording).

Tuning: aDADE