I’ll be joining the Dobro world!

Well, I’ve wanted to do this for a while, I’ve played a couple of dobros before and they’re super fun and I’ve wanted one for a couple years.

So, I just joined resohangout.com, and some people over there recommended I put a riser nut on an acoustic guitar to start learning. Shipping here isn’t reliable enough for me to order a real one, so I decided to make one out of wood.

So the only wood we have a bunch of is bamboo, which is a great wood, but has several limitations. It only comes in hollow round tube shaped pieces, cuz that’s how it grows, so it’s good for some projects, and not others. Also, it’s very fibrous, which means it’s very strong, but also there’s a lot of tearout when you cut it.

So I got a piece of bamboo, and carefully cut it to roughly the shape and size necessary, and then sanded it where necessary and then cut the string slots. I didn’t quite line up the slots correctly, so the bass strings are a bit crowded, but it’s not a big deal

So I’ve now installed it, and am playing my entire dobro repertoire (two songs) over and over…. fortunately (for my family), the guitar I put it on (pictured) is very quiet in general, and the bridge is ripping off so I tuned down a whole step. All that means that it’s very quiet and not annoying.

And as a slide bar I’m using a piece of a bicycle seatpost that we cut off of my brothers bike so the seat would go lower.

This is what we call African engineering!

Video to come soon….

“Well, I ain’t Jerry Douglas….. yet”

-Gunnar