I've been having too much fun working on (and playing!) my new bass to update the blog...

It's since been torn down for more carving on the front and back and the neck, and installation of the preamp. I'm hoping I can carve off a pound or so, it's pretty heavy. It was around 13 pounds in this picture.

Here's the sides gluing on, I left some flat spots on the body lines for clamping. The gluing went pretty well, though there is a slightly visible glue line on the back on the leg and electronics side at the neck end.

Here's the routing template for the electronics cavity, I almost got away with using all straight guide pieces for the super-template but the curved area just wanted to be a curve...

Here's the subtemplate with bumps for the brass inserts and an offset for a lip all around the edge.

And the finished cavity:

Side rails and body

 I got the purpleheart side rails glued on, using 1/4" fluted dowels to keep them aligned. The dowels go through the rails and into the neck and protrude enough from the rails to also align the body sides.

The fret ends are looking nice in this picture as well!

Here I've traced the full-size body drawing onto the wings so they can be roughed out before getting glued on.

I've left flat areas at a few points to make clamping easier...

Before gluing the sides on I'll rout out the pickup cavities and a 1/8" recess for the bridge. The template for the surface routs is all ready to go. I did the layout in qcad and printed it, then used adhesive spray to stick it to plywood. The lines served as guides to align strips of plywood which I then screwed down for use as template ring guides - a template for the template. There's a 1/8" offset from the template to the cut line, so the template template is offset 1/4" from the eventual holes in the instrument's surface.

The template will be held to the surface of the bass with double-stick carpet tape, which is basically the best thing ever for holding flat things down without clamps.

This is starting to look like a bass!

Neck block gluing up

The frets are in and coarse-dressed using this home-made tool, a block of maple with a file clamped to the side.

The two steel bars and allen bolts hold the file securely and double as hand-holds. It's a little hard to see in these shots, but the surface the file is on is at about a 35-degree angle to the wide face of the block. The wood rests on the surface of the frets and the file trims the corners, with the result being consistently beveled fret ends which need minimal individual attention. I used the same procedure on my guitar and it worked nicely.

Most of the carving on the back of the neck is done as well, currently it's got a fairly wide, flat back. I've left enough wood that I can still go the trapezoidal route, but I might just thin the sides a little more and go for rounded.

The neck block is now gluing up to the back of the neck, it's an 1/8" of bubinga sandwiched between the neck laminate and a chunk of the same walnut the back of the body is made from.

Once that dries, I'll plane the added blocks flush with the neck laminate and glue the purpleheart rails on to the side, then time for pickup and bridge routing.

Ready for frets

The markers are leveled and the board is sanded, ready to press in the frets.

Here's the head end, beveled and tapered for the break angle over the zero fret. The grooves help keep the strings aligned in the absence of a normal fret, at least in theory. If it doesn't work out in real life, I'll just cut a notch behind the fret line and put in a traditional nut. You can also see the ends of the graphite bars and the truss rod, as well as some unsightly staining from the epoxy used to glue in the graphite.

I put in markers up to the 24th fret, it seemed silly to put one in the 27th. The grain in the ebony is pretty visible in this pic, it was invisible until I got to 400-grit sandpaper. The edges of the fingerboard aren't sanded yet, you can still see a mark from the neck taper cut just in front of the 21st fret slot.

Pickup Shielding

While I'm waiting for fret markers and stainless steel fret wire, I decided to bust out the scissors and copper shielding foil to shield the inside of my pickup covers. The Nordstrand Fat Stacks I got have a tapped, true-single-coil mode which is susceptible to hum so it seemed like a good idea. I play-tested some of these a few weeks ago at a Guitar Center in an Ibanez 6-string, and they sounded fantastic, but do have a bit of hum when tapped.

It is a bit of a pain in the ass to get the adhesive-backed, curl-prone copper in there, which is no surprise. Turned out serviceable, not bad for a first attempt, but why I thought it was crucial to get it in in a single, complicated piece I'm not sure. It would have been much easier to do one big rectangle across the main width of the pickup, then two smaller pieces for the ends. But I've decided to be scientific and I'll try one shielded and one unshielded to start with so I can see just how much difference it makes. Before it goes into the bass, the cover shield will be connected with a soldered wire to the grounded copper strip on the back of the pickup which connects the pole pieces to "chassis" ground in the bass.

Progress! I got stalled out for ages, feeling unhappy about the restrictions on the truss rod placement from the Hipshot headpiece, and then realized I could just create my own. I generally hijacked the design used by David King, basing what I made off pictures from kingbass.com. This style of headpiece allows the truss rod to be adjusted at the head end, much more suited to a neck-through.

Once I got this created, I started work on the neck. The truss rod and graphite spars are installed, the fingerboard slotted and glued on, and the neck taper-cut on the tablesaw. The fingerboard is part-way to being compound-radiused, a slow task using a plane and a scraper on a 28-fret 6-string ebony board...