LeVan banjos are made by hand here in the Northern Appalachians - one at a time and no two are exactly alike. My primary practice is designing banjos for individual customers and each banjo I build is a prototype of that design. I’m not a mass-producer. The closest I come to that is the NewVintage openback, which I make in small batches of 3 to 6 - but even those are not all exactly the same. As an industrial designer, I am very familiar with mass production and have incorporated special features and hand work I know is not easily done in a factory.
LeVan banjos are built from the ground up. It’s what’s called “vertical integration”; I don’t merely assemble them from parts purchased from other suppliers - I make most of the parts by hand in the shop.
