Shady Grove on the oil can banjo

Comment

Comment by Eugene Knapik on February 3, 2013 at 12:23am

Thanks for your comments everyone. I'm planning two more oil can banjos. For these, I'm going to craft my own fretless neck rather than use a ready-made neck as I did with the first one. I had a chance to see Dena Lee's beautiful gourd banjos last week and I really like the fretless neck a lot - very nice to play.

Hey Bobby, the banjo isn't that hard to learn. I've only been playing since Christmas and I have a few songs I'm playing reasonably well already. There are all kinds of resources out there for Clawhammer banjo. I really like Rocket Science Banjo, which can be downloaded free (just ask Google).

Comment by Eugene Knapik on February 3, 2013 at 12:17am

Good question Scott. When I got the can it had half an inch of cutting oil still in it. I drained it as well as I could, and then I bought a bag of a product that is designed to clean up oil in garages. I think there are a few different brands. I put a liberal amount of this stuff in the can, shook it around, left it for a while, emptied it and then did this a couple more times. This got a lot of the oil out. I then cleaned it several times with lots of dish soap and water. I figured by swishing that around I might be able to create an emulsion with the remaining oil. This seemed to do the trick.  There is no odour and it seems to be pretty dry. I think the other approach is to use a solvent (pentene has been recommended to me). That was my back-up plan but I didn't want to mess with strong solvents unless I had to.

Comment by Scott aka Farmer Ted on January 30, 2013 at 12:59pm

Awesome sound...question...what do you use to clean out can so no residue and/or odours remain?

Comment by Randy S. Bretz on January 30, 2013 at 8:52am

Sounds great, never tried an oil or gas can build yet

Comment by jim on January 29, 2013 at 11:02pm

Sounds GOOD!

Comment by Bobby Ratliff on January 29, 2013 at 10:22pm

NICE! I'd love to be able to play banjo!