I’m wanting to make the shamisen but before that, it’d be a good idea to finish the banjo so that’s what we did. We are almost in the skin stretching stage but we have to make the metal ring first. We had these 1/2″ long and 1/4″ in diameter metal tubes
We made a copy of the wood pot to bend the metal over. It worked pretty well but as I was hammering the bendy metal over the copy, the clamp holding the metal to the wood slipped and almost hit my foot. This happened a few times and then when I was hammering the metal on the copy, the top part of the wood broke off which made it hard to bend the right angle. Fortunately, we also had another angle shaped out for bending but that broke too. All in all, it was out of shape. Later, I used the vise grip to bend it and that pretty much got it into shape but what really brought it together was just lightly clamping the metal to the original pot and then ever so slightly tightening it. That worked thankfully ’cause it was getting frustrating.
After that, I had to get some practice using the arc welder since we weren’t gonna use the torch. The welding stick kept sticking to the metal and I had a hard time making the arc without holding it to the metal (which made it stick). When I did get an arc, I couldn’t tell how close it was to the metal and I eventually lost it (the arc). Much later, I got the hang of it and made a little puddle of mettalic goop. The hard part was the visor/helmet. When I put the black glass (which protects the eyes from the super duper bright light) over my eyes, I couldn’t see what I was doing until I got an arc but most of the time I didn’t get an arc ’cause it either was stuck to the metal or the welding stick wasn’t even close to the metal ’cause where I thought it was wasn’t where it was. ( ’cause couldn’t see where it was ’cause I had the glass over my eyes).
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