Chords for Banjothon 2015 Jim Mills talks about the neck and Clanger

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I haven't played nothing but this since I got it.
I can say the neck's been here about a [D] week.
Frank built a great neck, Frank Kneed, and just couldn't be happier [E] with it.
That's great.
_ _ _ [G]
And we couldn't tell in your face or in [Db] the way that you're playing just how you really feel about this, Jim.
It's a different animal though.
I have to say I've had a no-hold flathead before but not a fat rim no-hold.
This is a Fanta's 9467-2.
It's got the same batch as, well there's about five known now.
One right here beside me and one right here beside me.
And J.D. Crow's is a dash 5.
_ _ [Em] And Paul, your number's dash 12 and then Brian's is dash [F] 14.
And Bill [A] Stokes' is dash 11. That's right.
[Em] Early's two and five.
[G] One and three and four never have turned up yet.
[D] Maybe [G] they will.
I don't know where they're at.
Well, I mean, Justin, you finding this and David finding _ _ [Dm] through Greg [F] Ernst and they're continuing to surface.
They are.
The thing that was interesting here is that one was in Lincoln, [Bb] Nebraska.
[G] This was in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Really?
Actually, Loop City, Nebraska.
[E] Loop City, Nebraska.
But both of them [G] more than likely shipped to Nebraska, which is [F] pretty weird.
Furniture store or music [C] store?
You know, I don't [G] know.
I've not checked into that.
I just know that's where he was from.
Could have shipped to Lincoln.
Yeah, for sure.
_ _ But we don't know.
Very cool to find them.
_ [E] _ That [G] bridge on there is [Ab] great.
[G] Whose bridge are you using?
This is an old David Wadsworth [Em] bridge.
I've had it for about [G] 15 years.
When David?
David Wadsworth, everybody knows him, is a pastor from around Bristol.
He makes bridges.
He doesn't make a bunch of them.
He just does when he feels like it.
He pastored this church for a good long while.
I think, if I'm not wrong, they had changed [D] something out in the church.
I think they had an old organ in there that had been some water damage in the floor.
[G] They pulled it out and when they did, they replaced a bunch of floorboards.
They happened to be great maple.
He noticed that and started to make some banjo bridges out of them.
He sent me two or three and I said, well send me about 20 of them.
He did and I used a bunch of them and they'd thrown a bunch of them in a [G] drawer.
I recently dug them out when I got this banjo.
It suits this banjo very well.
I had him build _ several different heights, thicknesses, [B] different sized bridges.
I said, build some, send him some old [D] Grover bridges from the 60s [G] that I had.
I said, something similar to that.
So that's a Grover profile Grover look.
Grover profile that David Wadsworth made for me probably a good 10, 15 [Gm] years ago.
It's been stuck in a drawer somewhere.
[A] I'm glad it came out when it was made.
It [G] works very well in this banjo. _ _ _ _ _
I think it's about a 120 year old maple.
[D] Wow.
_ _ [E]
Very cool.
_ _ Another thing I noticed [G] about this banjo is the neck wood came out of Kalamazoo.
A good friend of mine, Rob Barclay, salvaged some mahogany from my home that was built in Kalamazoo, Michigan in the 1920s and 30s.
This lady wanted him to replace a [D] _ finished carpet of a trade.
[G] I asked him where he got the particular piece of wood that was in the neck that he built.
He said, funny you should ask.
He said, I was remodeling a front door on a home in Kalamazoo that had [E] been built in maybe the 20s or 30s.
He said it was out of beautiful Honduras mahogany.
He said I was [A] able to get several banjo neck blanks out of that piece of wood.
I ended up buying [E] three from him.
I'd been saving them for a special project.
A few of them had some screw holes and things like that.
_ I've been saving them [G] for a special project.
When I got this [Cm] Plectrum banjo in, I knew I wanted Frank [E] to build me a five-string neck.
I sent Frank a piece of that same mahogany.
It's pretty neat that the mahogany came out of Kalamazoo, Michigan.
The fingerboard rosewood came out of the factory from the 60s.
It all came back together to where it would be.
If I didn't have the other thing too, these detuners on here are just standard Keith detuners.
I had gotten in several conversion banjos over the period of [G] several years with detuners on them.
Some of them in disrepair, missing screws, not working.
I called Bill Keith last year.
I said, Bill, they tell me you'll refurbish these detuners.
He said, yeah, $18 a set.
Send them back and I'll refurbish them.
I said, okay.
I sent him three or four sets, gold ones, nickel ones, whatever.
_ _ This past October, he came to visit me during IBMA in Raleigh.
He said, there's something special about this particular set of tuners.
He had a little note on it.
He said, ask me about these tuners.
It's a [E] very rare pair [Gm] from 1964.
I asked him about them.
He said, this [G]
particular set of tuners is of the first 100 Keith detuners ever made.
He said, the reason he knows that is they changed the design.
The actual body of the tuner is a little shorter than what they make today.
He showed me they added a pin that wasn't in there in the first batch.
He said, the first set, of course, they sent to Earl Scruggs.
He said, the funny thing is they didn't work.
They had never tested them under [D] tension and Earl sent them back.
They had to replace a pin.
[E] This is an early, early set of tuners, one of the first 100 sets ever made.
[G]
They work great.
I'd say they're some of the best detuners I've ever had.
Like you had mentioned about the _ nail holes.
Yeah, there's a nail hole.
There's a screw hole actually present in the heel.
You can see that Frank Fats, when he made the neck.
I thought I'd give [C] him a blank that didn't have any in it, but that's absolutely it.
[G] It kind of goes along with the story.
That's for sure. That's great.
Very cool.
Very cool.
It's a very [E] lightweight piece of wood.
This neck off the banjo [D] just feels lighter to me than the typical neck that you feel today.
I attribute that to the older piece of wood.
_ [Em] Another cool thing that we can think about is [G] I understood that [A] Gibson didn't necessarily buy their Honduras mahogany directly from Honduras.
They bought it from [G] an exotic wood dealer there in Kalamazoo for the most part or somewhere local.
I would have to think this piece of wood that went in a house in Kalamazoo in the 20s and 30s more than [Em] likely came from the same place.
[G] _
It's got that same kind of grain pattern.
J.D. Crow and I talked years ago about mahogany today on some necks doesn't look like the same kind of grain [D] pattern that you saw in the 30s.
[G]
This has that.
I noticed it.
I'm not real scientific, but there's a lot of different species of spruce, for example, and the same goes for mahogany.
It's all over the place in the way it looks.
This has that real lightweight, [D] real_
It's got a really good tone.
Frank said it's some of the best wood he'd worked with.
If there's old growth maple, there's old growth mahogany.
I [G] imagine it matters about where it came from in Honduras, where it was cut, [Dm] what kind of elevations, whatever it might have been, how well it was dried out.
[C] I [G] was talking to a guy here today about that.
He said, man, what a great place for wood to naturally air dry in the elements of a door of a house.
My God, it was everything, snow, cold, [E] rain.
Hot in the summer and dry.
[G] It had been in his house since it was built in the 1920s and 30s.
Is that right?
Yes, it was pretty cool.
Ultimate weather exposure. Kalamazoo wood.
Yeah.
[D] _ _ Came out of some rain forest somewhere.
_ Well, we can't find Brian, can we?
[N] _ _ _