Not gone, just really slow

Starting a tenor, Spanish cedar neck. The plan is to use the Hana Lima ‘Ia plans (since they worked well last time) with a Spanish heel. I have some Engelman spruce for the soundboard, and East Indian rosewood for everything else. But for now, I just have a mess of glue.

Cut to rough size

Scarf joint ready for smoothing

Heel stack glueup

I thought I had a photo of the scarf joint glueup, but I can’t seem to find it now. It wasn’t important anyway. Scarf joint was cut on the table saw using an angle jig, and smoothed with a block plane. It still needs to be thinned down a little bit.

Front and Back

I thought this was a good idea, but it turned out less than great.

They say the back side is for the player.

Finishing, unfinished

Not much visible progress. Doing the French polish thing.

Everything looks better with proper lighting.

It looks a lot better in photos than in person. It’s only shiny if you get the light hitting it just right.

Baby Steps

Not a lot of progress, what with holidays, vacation, and other projects. Although many are restricted to their homes and not working, I’m still putting in 40 hours a week. It’s just from my dining table instead of an office.

As noted last time, I forgot to leave a way to get the ground wire from the bridge to the control cavity. So here’s that done:

Bass body with new (and improved?) holes.

Strings

Strung up in the white. This way I can get a rough setup and look for major problems.

Still needs all the wiry stuff.

What lousy photo composition. It’s not something I’m good at. Should have taken it outside, but I want the wood to acclimate to indoor temperature and humidity. (The neck made a nice hygrometer in the garage.)

GSO

I’ve attached the neck, so I guess it’s officially a guitar-shaped object now.

Well, it looks like a bass.

Bass Frets

Had some time over the weekend to make some more progress. The combination of fretwire that matches the slot width, combined with a proper fretting hammer (seen in the first photo) made this probably the easiest fret installation I’ve done so far.

Frets being installed

Hole-y Headstock

I drilled tuner holes. But first I had to order a 14mm brad-point bit. (Well, it didn’t have to be brad-point, but they work a lot better for this application.)

Hmm, this might not be a genuine made-in-Austria Fisch. New bit on the left, an older one on the right.

Headstock

Finally got around to gluing the plate on the headstock. To be trimmed later. Pretty sure it’s padouk. I know it’s left over from a previous uke build.

Need more clamps.

Thought I’d done this

While it’s definitely easier and faster to post photos to Instagram, for some reason it doesn’t automatically generate a complete blog post here simultaneously. Possibly because WordPress is a completely separate entity. So you’ll have to pay attention to two different locations to get a more complete picture of what’s going on. I’m sure you can handle it.

Enough of that. You’ll have seen this first photo already, I suspect.

Bass body in a vise, after rasping most of the edges.