1890s Washburn 5-String Pony Openback Banjo

Washburn banjos from the late 1800s are pretty fantastic old instruments. They're built tough, have nice design features (check out that "downpressure" tailpiece tailor-made for gut stringing), and they have a solid, dependable sound. I'm sad I didn't get a video for this one -- it's got a good, snappy, straight-up voice about it.

This was in from a customer for repair. I gave it a level/dress of the frets, replaced a wooden 5th peg with a parts-bin mechanical friction peg (the others had already been swapped with period Champion pegs at the headstock), set the neck angle back a bit, added side dots, cleaned it up, and set it up.

It's got heavy tension ("Minstrel") Nylgut strings on it so that at its reduced scale length (~21" or so) it can be tuned to "standard" G tuning without the strings being slack or mushy. When these little guys were first made the intention was usually to tune up to C from normal G tuning.