neepheid

Looks like you had a good laugh. Some nifty playing there and some sweet gear. With playing and gear like that on offer even at the tiniest bassbash you won't catch me embarrassing myself at such a gathering any time soon with my rag and bone collection of cut price basses and my near total absence of technical ability! Maybe one day.

Glad it worked out. Looking good - understated mods which add to the functionality without screaming out at you. Heh, and now I understand why you wanted that particular shape

Welcome to the forum

[quote name='cheddatom' post='336269' date='Nov 25 2008, 02:25 PM']Is it finished?!?!?[/quote] No, not finished, but a substantial leap forward.

I hope that this bass has legendary sustain and tone, because it's going to be rather heavy. Wide neck with twin truss rods coupled to a solid zebrano body (more dense than maple) equals one heavy hombre. How do I know this? I'll let you know in a few days...

Thanks for the kind words people. Tonight I took the clamps off and trimmed the veneer to the edges of the headstock. It went well apart from the widest points of the headstock where the zebrano veneer followed the grain and chipped off a few mms - in spite of the glue. All is not lost though, I kept the broken bits and superglued them on then VERY slowly sanded them to shape with 400 grit sandpaper. It seems to have worked. You can see the superglue darkening the veneer somewhat on the point nearest you in this photo - hopefully it will not show through whatever clear finish I put on it.

Welcome to the forum. Perhaps spending some time here will tempt you into picking up a bass once more

I have applied the veneer to the face of the headstock, this is the second attempt - the first one slipped a mm or two when applying the iron so I had to pick/sand it all off and start again Then I had the bright idea of sticking the nut blank into the slot and push up against the nut when ironing - sorted! Clamp city, hoping that the glue has squished out to the edges: We'll see how it fares after an overnight clamping.

Just bought an inexpensive J copy from this basschatter. Cool guy, easy to deal with and keeps you posted on the progress of things throughout.

[quote name='Delberthot' post='332863' date='Nov 20 2008, 08:16 AM']Have a gander here, although a laminate won't make that much difference to the sound. Now, an all walnut body would be another ketle of fish. [url="http://www.warmoth.com/bass/options/options_bodywoods.cfm"]http://www.warmoth.com/bass/options/options_bodywoods.cfm[/url] One wood I've always wanted to try in a bass. Fat chance unless I get one made as there weren't many walnut Ps made.[/quote] I've got a walnut body blank, waiting patiently for the day I get a bandsaw (woo hoo, Christmas is coming).

Walnut is towards the lower end of the hardness scale, so I'm assuming that it'll be warm but slightly brighter sounding than Mahogany for example, but won't approach the brightness of Ash or Maple. I'm not sure that a cap has a huge amount of influence on the sound of a bass, but if it does then it might serve to mitigate any harshness in the denser woods of Ash and Maple.

I'd agree that it depends upon the size/shape of the neck heel/pocket. If it's a fairly standard Fender sized thing then 4 ought to do. I suspect that 6 screws in a tight spacing might actually weaken the neck pocket, depending on the type of wood we're talking about here.

Well, it's been a while since I looked at this so I did a little work on it. The hole which was already there for the jack socket was rather thin and I always planned to use a Neutrik locking jack socket which requires a 24mm hole. Redrilling into an existing hole on the edge seemed rather risky so I decided to grind it out with the sanding drums on the Dremel-ish. Took a while, but at least I was able to work up towards the required size. Of course, the flat plate of the Neutrik doesn't sit well on a curved surface, so I had to carve out a recess for it. And for the final problem, Farnell or Neutrik forgot to give me screws with which to fasten the socket. Thankfully, I had some old black tuners I could steal some screws from. Enough yap, here's the result:

[quote name='steve-norris' post='331221' date='Nov 18 2008, 06:50 AM']some truss rods can be unscrewed and removed ( Warwicks spring to mind) if it was me i would see if it could be removed while it's still possible, after a while those little tweaks may finish it off and lead to a major issue.[/quote] Oh, for sure. I was just amazed that it turned it at all. It was one of those things you randomly read online when you're trying to solve another problem and you think "no way, that'll never work" but you're intrigued enough to try it anyway If it stops turning with this then it would be a case of cutting a slot in the head of the nut and using a large screwdriver, I guess.

I recently decided to adjust the truss rod on my Takamine acoustic bass. Imagine my dismay when the truss rod nut had been chewed by some nitwit before me. I discovered something today which may or may not help, depending on how badly chewed the hex nut is. Try turning it with a Torx driver, I found a T27 went in and turned the nut! Result! I'm not saying that it will work in all instances (if the nut is totally chewed then it won't work, but if there are still some edges to work with it seems the Torx can move it. Just thought I'd mention it here and see what people thought before putting it in the wiki somewhere.

Surely loosening the truss rod will increase the amount of relief that the string tension will pull and therefore make any dusty end problems due to the bow in the neck worse? Sight a line down the neck and check the relief. If that is the problem, then it sounds like you have too much - you need to tighten the truss rod in that case. But like the burpster says, check it isn't other things too. The fact that it affects one string in particular means it's less likely that it's the neck as a whole. Bear in mind also that necks can take time to settle in after truss rod adjustments.

[quote name='Happy Jack' post='330725' date='Nov 17 2008, 03:27 PM']Define "improve". My coffee cup hasn't changed its shape in a century. It was a pretty good design for drinking coffee then, and it still works perfectly well now. This is a classic example of [i]If it ain't broke, don't fix it[/i].[/quote] +1 I tried really hard to design my first bass from scratch to be original, but it ended up being a slightly offset waisted Les Paul Money bass (which I didn't know of at the time). Bah, humbug. I'm still going to make it though I think it's really hard to make something original which is such a stellar leap forward it will convince people to change the way they think about basses. There is also the problem that a radical improvement is so far ahead of its time that it doesn't overcome traditional and conservative outlooks. Think of the guitars Andrew Bond came up with - stepped fingerboard instead of frets, digital readout of the settings. What happened? Disappeared *shrugs*

That's mad. What a shame it's J profile, I'm all about the cricket bat P. Hope you manage to find a helper.

You can put that down to the rose-tinted Fender Vintage Madness that seems to be prevailing at the moment.