Bass, completed enough

It’s as done as any mass-market instrument you’d buy in a store, only more expensive and lower quality. Materials info after the jump.

front view

the side no one looks at

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.)

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.

Still progressing

Haven’t posted anything recently, but I have been working – albeit slowly – on this neck. Clickitinate to embiggenify.

The headstock-to-neck area gave me some problems. Partly caused by not being able to plane the headstock to an even thickness using the Saf-T-Planer; my drill press really isn’t big enough to handle this piece.

Rough shaped neck

Since the nut end was more-or-less the right profile, I worked on the body end.

Inefficient?

There is probably a better way to do this.

I think the real solution is to not use maple for necks. I can tough it out for one custom neck, I guess.