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.