Good thread, Bonnie--and whazzzup, Rick and Guy and Catspaw and McGrath and Kendall and all...

This may be a place--seeing how knowledgeable all of you are--to ask for some feedback about a banjo I recently acquired: It's an S. S. Stewart "Universal Favorite" No. 1, which sold for $20 in the 1890's, and for which I paid $450 in October. It was apparently all original except the skin head had been replaced with a frosted one and some owner apparently paid to have some pretty fancy inlays done in the peg head and mother of pearl stars and diamonds in the neck. Or it may be the neck of a more upscale instrument in the line (the dowel stick is stamped S. S. Stewart and has an 1890's serial number).

The frosted head was too shrill and kind of ugly so I bought a fiberskin head, took the instrument apart completely, polished off a century's accumulation of tarnish and gunk on the nickel plated german silver pot (backed by cedar) and put it back together with the new head. It looks great and sounds even better, no longer shrill but rich and loud.

The tuners are the original friction pegs with ivory knobs--which I hoped to replace with geared tuners (I bought some from Elderly which were supposed to fit old time banjos without enlarging the peg holes in the head, but the shafts are 9/32nds (as advertised) but the holes are a quarter of an inch, so installing them would require some drilling out, thus perhaps reducing the value of the instrument. In addition, the headstock is 5/8ths of an inch thich, and the tuners' shafts wont fit a headstock any thicker than a half inch, so in order to install them, I'd have to countersink the holes an eighth or 3/16ths of an inch.

Now I'm not as concerned about maintaining the collector's value of the instrument as I am in having it playable (and retunable--I use several different tunings and the old friction tuners, in order to hold pitch, have to be tightened so much that they practically require a wrench to tune them). The neck is also just slightly warped, making it harder to fret above the 5th fret, and particularly above the 10th, and the last few frets, from about 19 up are there only in principle--the 22nd fret is what you hear when you fret any of the last two or three below it.

If I could afford it, I might have a neck built by Wyatt Fawley (I have a banjerine with a 1920's Slingerland head and a Fawley neck--sweet sounding but not very loud: wooden pot, no tone ring) or Mike Ramsey. I really love the sound of the instrument but I have a hard time with the neck: I'm spoiled by the fantastic action of my Wildwood Tubaphone.

Whaddaya think? Should I assault this beautiful peghead and make the instrument tunable or should I respect its age and beauty and maintain it as it is--or have a new neck built but keep the old one to maintain the instrument's value (if my purchase price is any indication, it's not a highly valued collector's item anyway--a new neck would cost about what I paid for the banjo in the first place).

--seed