NEW PRICE – $150,000.  Offers are welcome.

Standard size – .375″ step from foot to bottom of skirt, skirt inner diameter is 10.855″.

Prewar size – .403″ step from foot to bottom of skirt, skirt inner diameter is 10.843″.

The back cut is what I call a bull nose cut. The weight of the ring is approximately   3 pounds, 1.5 ounces.

The rings are stamped Huber HR-30 in the bull nose and numbered sequentially.  Huber HR-30 will be etched  on the outside of the ring under the tail piece.

Below is a bit of how the ring was developed.

There’s an old saying that goes like this. “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you, it’s what you think you know that’s just not so.”  In 1997 I started producing the Huber “vintage” flat head tone ring. I have manufactured over 4000 of these  prewar replica tone rings made of the same alloy as the old ones. Since then, I have had well over a hundred prewar flathead rings/ banjos come across my bench and have learned a lot from them in the past 12 years. Many of these old rings (not all) were very special in that they had “something going on” that no other ring has including mine. For many years I’ve been wanting to find the time to do reasearch on these “special” rings. I decided to start investigating the process of duplicating these old rings exactly about 14 months ago.  I was convinced the answer was in the casting process. I  contacted an acquaintance, Mr. Tommy Horton, who I had met about 11 years ago. Tommy is a non-ferrous casting consultant and one smart guy.  He introduced me to a metallurgist friend of his, and between the two of them have over a 100 years experience in bronze casting. Tommy agreed with me that there were casting “tricks of the trade” that were used in the 1920′s and 30′s and suggested I experiment with my pouring process utilizing some old “tricks”  to replicate the prewar process. Needless to say, he was right, and it worked!

The next part of this story belongs to Dr. Jim Rae. He is a genius, period. Jim’s doctorate is in Physiology and Biophysics and he spent much of his life studying the single molecules necessary for nerve impulses and other bioelectric phenomena. I needed a way to test prewar flathead rings to see their physical vibration characteristics.  Amazingly, many of the test methods Dr. Rae used were similar to the methods I needed to test rings. Dr. Rae designed two tests;  one, to measure the ability of a substance (in this case a tone ring) to accept vibrations and two, to measure the  forced induced vibration velocity. As of this time, we have collected the data from 15 prewar flat rings. We then measured the new rings from each pour comparing them to the prewar measurements. I then tweaked  the pouring process many, many times until I duplicated the prewar rings exactly and the HR-30 (Huber Rae-1930) was born.

Steve

measuring the vibration velocity of a prewar rim

Bryan Sims and I are working on a new 3 ply rim I’m calling an “engineered” rim.  We are tap tuning the plys before we bend them into a rim.  With the help of Dr.Rae, we have measured the forced induced vibration velocity of 35 prewar banjo rims. We then measure the new rim with tuned plys and compare it to our prewar data. As you can imagine, there are many  species of maple as well as many densities. We have collected the data from over 40 test rims so far but we are still in the early stages of development.  The good news is that this is going to work. I will be able to predict how a rim will sound by what wood I use.  Check back soon for a mp3 sample of  one of the test rims paired with an HR-30 prototype ring (see the post above). 

Steve