A long hiatus...

The project stalled out a bit as work and school were eating a lot of my time, and there were looming hardware expenses as well. But I haven't been entirely idle! I have most of a replacement neck built for my Stingray 5-string. It's a 35-inch scale, 23-fret, fretted neck with Musicman-style headstock. Fingerboard is macassar ebony, neck is 5-piece maple and bubinga with a 15-degree tilt-back scarf-jointed headstock and macassar headplate. Two graphite stabilization rods, and same style of home-made truss rod which will be used in the 6-string that this blog was created for. Nut will be red brass, tuners are chrome Hipshot Ultralites. Once I have the neck completed, I plan to sell my lovely Bongo 5-string to fund further work on the 6. Pictures of in-progress Stingray neck to follow....

Publish Post

truss rod

Today I finished the truss rod. It's constructed from carbon steel rod folded in half, a 0.5"x0.25"x0.75" brass block, a brass nut, a washer, and flashing tape.

 Here's the folded end. A map gas torch and a hammer made this quite easy. OK, that's an oversimplification. I first tried this with T-303 stainless and time after time the metal fractured at the bend, once breaking completely apart. I moved up to map gas from propane and got the metal yellow-hot and thoroughly reworked the bend with a hammer and got a nearly acceptable result. After consulting with the luminaries on the MIMForum, I moved to carbon steel rod, which made the bend an absolute breeze. The stainless did thread quite nicely (with a better thread quality than the carbon steel) though it was somewhat resistant to the die.

The brass block, already cut out from the stock bar, ready for marking with the height gauge.

The height gauge is one of those tools that has limited applications, but is so good at those tasks that it's almost indispensable. The granite surface plate it's resting on is also very useful for truing planer and chisel blades, or anything else that needs to be very, very flat.

The block with centers marked and punched, ready for drilling.

This free-machining brass sure is nice to drill. Small, even chips, very smooth.

The pieces all fit together. The threaded end is too long, but otherwise the metalwork is done at this point.

Testing the rod. Yup, it bends good!

Trimmed the threaded section, and wrapped the rods in metal flashing tape. The added width of the tape brings the width from 0.1875" up to almost exactly 0.2", just the right width as I've got a 0.200" router bit.

body sides trimmed

The body wings came out of the clamps and got trimmed.


Here we see a trimmed edge and an icky, gluey edge.

Trimming in the tablesaw. I got a lot of sawdust on myself doing this. The orange plastic featherboard wasn't strictly needed for this cut, but sometimes it's a real lifesaver.

It's starting to look like a bass! At least to me... The purpleheart rails are deceptively long here.

The purpleheart will be less pink once the finish goes on...

hardware info added

I added pictures and info about the hardware on the /dev page.

walnut for body, neck emerges

Haven't updated in a bit, but progress has been happening.

I changed the body design somewhat. Bubinga and wenge would have made for a pretty heavy body, so I started hunting around for a lighter wood for the back. I went to Woodrcrafters here in town and found some nice-looking walnut that caught my eye.

Walnut might not be the first wood that comes to mind when thinking of light woods, but compared to the rest of the woods on this bass, it feels like balsa. The back will be 1 1/8" of this nice brown walnut, 3/8" thick wenge will still be the top layer, with a 1/8" thick slice of bubinga between them for contrast. Here's the woods all sliced up and getting ready to glue:

And here it is with loads of clamps. Notice the 80s colored plastic exercise step serving as workbench; I decided if it was too cold in the basement for me to comfortably apply glue, it was probably a little too cold for glue to set nicely, so glue-up happened in the laundry room.

The neck has emerged from its clamps and sat around for a while, it wasn't too pretty at first. Somehow the pictures failed to capture how gross it looked with all the glue all over it, trust me, it was hideous. Note the lovely Incra square in this shot, drawing lines with this thing is wonderful.

A couple passes across the jointer cleaned it up nicely.

New sketch in /home

I've created what is hopefully the final sketch of the body in /home

Found carbon fiber source

I found a source for carbon fiber rods longer than 24", so I can have carbon fiber the whole length of the neck. They've got them at goodwinds.com. The really nice part is I can get two 48" rods shipped for about $30, which is about the same as just two 24" rods from LMI and less than two 24" rods from Stewart-Macdonald.

truss rod will adjust at... body

I spoke to Hipshot yesterday about their headless hardware. As I suspected, the design of the headpiece makes a head-adjusting truss rod impractical, in part because of one of the three anchor screws, which on the six string model is right in the middle, where a truss rod access hole would be. Can't say I'm looking forward to making a neck-through have truss rod access at the neck.

I'm still not totally resolved on whether I should go with the brass acorn nut or the steel spoke-wheel style, but one strong argument in favor of the brass is that the softer brass threads will strip far more easily than the stainless threads of the rod, and replacing the rod in a body-adjusting neckthrough would require fingerboard removal, which is no fun at all. So probably brass.

Cut & planed the top

This morning I cut and thickness planed the wenge top, pics here.

The wood was about 1" thick to start with, and I wanted the top to be 3/16" thick. Perfect job for a resaw blade in the bandsaw.

The grain should look very nice once it's sanded and finished. If I'd hunted at a wood store, I probably could have found a nicer piece which was more flatsawn, but this board had the distinct virtue of already being paid for.

A few passes through the thickness planer and the boards reached the desired 0.375" (3/16").

The wenge managed to bite me, it seems like any time I work with this wood it demands a blood sacrifice. Of course, any crisp 90-degree angle acts like a serrated knife with wenge, so it's pretty easy to brush a knuckle against it and get a small wound that stings for hours.

Neck is gluing up

Tonight I glued up the neck, photo album here. First, I wiped down all the glue surfaces with acetone to remove dust and surface oils. Evaporating acetone on a rag gets surprisingly cold. Then I wiped Tite-Bond on each surface and stacked the layers up on some aluminum foil on top of my tablesaw, and started clamping.

It sure is nice to have lots of clamps around, and the big Bessey parallel-face clamps are perfect for a task like this. I don't have quite enough of those to completely cover a 48" neck, especially when using 3 of them oriented perpendicular to the others to prevent shifting of the glue-lubricated laminates, so I filled in the gaps with more ordinary (and much cheaper) clamps.

As I stacked the layers together, I was again blown away by how WIDE this neck will be. I've never owned a 6-string, and my left hand started feeling intimidated. Of course, the full neck is 3.6" wide, whereas the fingerboard will be more like 3.5" at its widest, and only 2.215" wide at the nut. But still, this is an assload of wood! Weighs a ton, glad more than half will get carved off!

I'll leave it clamped for a few days (which is probably overkill), and then let it sit for a few weeks to let it fully dry out before truing it up on the tablesaw and planer in preparation for routing slots for the graphite stiffening spars and truss rod.

A plan is hatched... A bass to be built

Once again, I've gotten the itch to build a physical, tangible object. Programming is nice, but sometimes having an end product that you could fend off a burglar with is desireable.


This time I'm going to build a 6-string bass. Design basics are as follows:

• 7-piece neckthrough, neck woods are purpleheart, bubinga and wenge, graphite reinforced
• wenge body top, with bubinga back (probably, body wood might change)
• purpleheart body rails inspired by (stolen from) David King
• truss rod will be homemade, stainless or titanium, acorn nut or spoke wheel, more thought needed here... may adjust at head or body.
• 24-fret ebony fingerboard with brass nut and zero-fret, with stainless steel frets (so shiny!)
• Hipshot headless hardware in black, with 0.708" (18mm) string spacing
• Nordstrand Fat Stacks pickups, stacked dual coils w/wide arpeture & single-coil sound
• Audere Audio Z-Mode preamp with 4-band EQ
• electronics cover plate will probably be aluminum sheet with a wood veneer, ebony or bubinga
• probably a Neutrik locking jack in black