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...

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...