In this video I build a banjo in the most round-about ways possible.
Don't ask what I was thinking with those title cards. I'm not so sure myself...
This guy's videos were a big help. They're also entertaining to watch, i'd recommend watching them if you haven't already.
https://www.youtube.com/user/fletch123/ (as always, I hope I pronounced the name right in the video!)
If you want to hear that song at the end played properly, this guy (Andy) does an exellent cover.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjr_gRTuPcM
The music used for the title cards was this track by Malmen, used with his permission. Bit of a strange website, but it reminds me of what the internet was like 10-15 years ago.
http://battleofthebits.org/arena/Entry/Life+Cycle/22353/
I learned to play the banjo (and guitar) following this guy's, Patrick Costello's, videos on frailing. He's a peculiar fellow who keeps changing course in weird ways, so sometimes he decides to do stuff like delete all his videos and then a bit later put them all back up. But despite that he's still very good at teaching this stuff. I'm a bit out of practise myself though.
https://www.youtube.com/user/Dobro33H
I've got some shoddy drawings for this banjo, provided as-is. There wasn't much of a good plan since I built most of the stuff to fit as I went along. This sketchup model is just a whole load of... stuff I slapped down to help figure things out. Sketchup is great for things that are cylinders and squares, but it really falls apart when you try to make anything a bit more complicated like a banjo neck.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1DQACn8Wh8zQlhhS25sbGJIMEE/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-Dd1JfPduhZOtBOCJAZZUNQ
There was an excellent website with alot of banjo making advise, called Bluestem, but it's been down for a while now and is probably gone for good. Which is a shame, or i'd link it here.
Edit (02/11/16): I did a bit of searching and found the bluestem website hosted on the wayback machine. It's worth a look since it goes into a good amount of detail on some of the trickier things like the banjo neck angles.
http://web.archive.org/web/20160328213135/http://www.bluestemstrings.com/pageBanjoDesign.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20160329132923/http://www.bluestemstrings.com/pageBanjoConstructionTips1.html
Also I hope this video doesn't leave out too much. There was alot of ground to cover with this video and I sort of skimmed over a bunch of stuff to try keep the runtime down.