Andyjr1515

I always agonise over investments in tools and facilities, but having decided that hand radiusing hardwood fretboards is the road to insanity, I built myself a radiusing jig a few years ago. While it worked well, it was a bit inconsistent and quite difficult to setup. So last year I bit the bullet and went for the G&W (Guitar & Woods) unit with a couple of extra radii formers. And boy, am I glad I did! It does the job quickly and efficiently - but more to the point, accurately. Took 30-40 minutes total to get the router out, tape the fretboard with 2-sided taped to the jig, set the router to the correct height and do the job. Then 10 minutes of finish sanding with a sanding block to get rid of the router lines, a quick initial wipe with tru-oil and here we are: Not sure how well it comes out in the photos, but while being very wenge-like, the panga panga has some orange in it which is perfect to tone with the body wood. I'll check with Tom what nut width he wants, cut the taper and then I can start on the neck.

Spent most of the day on the fretboard. First job was to plane the sides straight and level. Panga panga really is very wenge-like : There is a mystique about multi-scales but the only complicated bit (unless you have some VERY fancy kit) is that you have to cut the frets the 'old fashioned' way - that is, with a perpendicular block, some clamps and a fret saw. This is because at the angles you need to get to, you generally can't use a standard carpenters or luthier mitre-block. Basically, you mark out the fret positions of the longer scale at one side of the board, mark up the fret positions of the shorter scale on the other side of the board and just cut your slots between each pair of marks So first I stick a long steel rule to the fretboard with 2-sided tape, and use the Stewmac calculator to give me each position relative to the nut and then press a tiny indent into the board with a sharp-ended punch: I then reposition the rule to the other side of the board, inset it by an inch and repeat using the fret spacings of the smaller scale Next, I clamp a perpendicular block with it's square face lining up with each pair of indents, ensuring that the sawblade, when pressed against the block face EXACTLY bisects each indent: I start off the slot gently, holding the saw blade against the wood block. Once I have the start of a slot - enough to hold the blade in position, I can be a bit more energetic. The perpendicular block has been cut to a height so that the spine of my saw rides along it once I've reached the depth of slot I'm planning to go to: Then I unclamp, move the fretboard forward, align the block between the next pair of indents, reclamp and repeat. Three done, 21 to do And continue until they are all done! And by the magic of mathematics, if the fret positions either side are correct, then the fret positions of anywhere across the fretboard are going to be correct, whether that is 4 strings, 5 strings or 6

I can answer that. Yes - using Tru-oil as the lube.

Have continued to be a bit distracted by home jobs (latest being Storm Ciara which dumped a months worth of rain down our chimneys, swamping the cooker extractor fan that blew the electrics to the cooker and everything around it...that was fun ) BUT finally got round to updating the drawing with a 33" to 31" multiscale just to see how extreme it looked. Looks OK to me (clearly, the headstock will need to shift a touch to the right): Being a bit of a 'bitsa' build, I dug out a couple of pickups that might do OK. Pretty sure they are both Artec Alnico V's - a standard bridge humbucker and a neck mini-humbucker. Hard coupled could be interesting... I'll talk to Tom and see what he thinks. So I think I'm getting close to cutting some wood...

Beautiful.

It is indeed. However, they do need a bit of fettling. @Jabba_the_gut used them on one of his and did a great job of cleaning up the threads and lubricating. I actually used two (they are as cheap as chips) and made up one good one from the best components of the two. The resulting 'good one' was perfectly OK, though, and works great.

Hi It's difficult to see from the photo, but is it a bow, or is it just a very high action, or a bit of both? Which fret is it at 12mm and what is the gap at, say, the 21st fret with the strings tensioned up? In terms of the 'standard' measurement of neck relief, with strings held down to the frets at the 1st and the 18th frets, what is the gap at the 7th fret? When the neck is off the bass, is it possible to induce any back-bow at all? If not, then it sounds like the rod is out of adjustment or faulty, or that the neck has 'relaxed' over time into a bow that is too large for the trussrod to correct. With the strings off and the trussrod loosened, what was the gap in the middle of the fretboard? If you can get some back bow with the strings un-tensioned, it's worth trying starting off like that and then adding the string tension. If, with the strings off there is decent effect from the trussrod, but nevertheless a remaining substantial gap in the middle of the fretboard with the trussrod fully loosened, then you are probably into a defret, relevel and re-fret (I had to do one recently with exactly that issue) or, worst case, consider a replacement neck. Clearly, if the bow itself is controllable with the truss rod, but the overall action is still very high, then a shim at the rear of the neck pocket will get it back to normal adjustment range.

Another fan of Laklands here. Look forward to seeing it at the next Bash!

Probably because they've seen some of my other builds

Beautiful job.

Hi, John Yes - I fully take your point. I'll do a quick sketch tomorrow but yes, the 'normal' way (ie conventional wisdom) is, as someone earlier inferred, to make the part of the neck tenon that extends into the body the bottom half, not the top half. So almost like a through neck except it finishes a couple of inches in. That way, the heel of the neck supports the transition and you don't get those particular stress points. But it would then mean that my machine screw inserts would be inserted into the African drum wood. And I have no idea of its properties except I DO know that it is hard and brittle. The advantage of having the maple tenon at the top is that the African wood, is only under compression - between the maple tenon and the heel plate - and it will be immensely strong in that configuration, with or without a biscuit 'slot'. The inserts, under tension, will be in rock maple - and I know that is strong enough. So the only risk is that the maple delaminates between the heel carve and the neck length. I think that is very unlikely and I can moderate that by increasing the transition from neck thickness to heel/body thickness. While I haven't fully committed to which way yet, I still favour the one as drawn. I keep coming back to the fact that @eude 's 6 stringer bass neck was the most solid bolt-on neck joint I can remember ever doing, despite the fact that it had the tension of the extra two strings and was less than 3/4 of the thickness of most. Then again...I might be completely wrong

You say the nicest things, you old flatterer, you

Nice routing job, @GarethFlatlands I usually do the top bearing then flip to use a bottom bearing when I'm routing body blanks. Works well. Nice clean cuts on your maple

Actually, me too. We have a small print of a painting in one of our rooms that has a sea-horizon at sunset and it was the first thing I thought of when I took the board out of its packaging

@GarethFlatlands donated panga panga, David Dyke sourced maple neck and Tom's African drumwood body...doesn't get much better than this for complimentary colour tones :

If you try this or a screw extractor, then before you start, hold the tip of a hot soldering iron against the stub for a minute first. It will make the screw expand and when it cools down again it will be much looser than it is at the moment. But I agree with @ezbass , moving the button up to a centimeter will make no difference to the balance. If you do this, go up from the present position (towards the left in your photo)

Wow. Inspired!

Pretty much the same as wenge - on both counts. So yes - not the easiest to use but should be OK. We'll find out soon

@GarethFlatlands piece of panga panga arrived today and what a lovely piece of wood! I think he hand picked it for me out of the 5 pieces he has. Many, many thanks, Gareth And the bathroom's finished And the loft insulation is done And so I can now spend some quality time on this little (?) project I'll take a shot of the panga panga when the light is back in the morning

Very stylish

That should work. Personally, for ebony I use clear epoxy mixed with a decent amount of ebony dust. I fill the chamber with the mixture then squeeze the insert in. The epoxy squeezes out though any gaps. When sanded off they are completely invisible.

Very accurate work. True craftsmanship.

And...we're going to take up the kind offer of some panga panga from @GarethFlatlands

Yes - looking really good

Not at all - they are perfectly decent ideas. Trouble is with making it longer is that it would show beyond the end of the fretboard but yes, you could extend the lower part of the body pocket. I personally would still tend to use machine screws as the thinness of the neck in the pocket area means that wood screws would need to be much shorter than normal, thus using significantly less threads to take the force. Machine screw inserts typically have external threads much wider than wood screws and therefore can create the same load spread over a much shorter length. But that's the great thing about this as a hobby - there are a huge number of different ways of solving the same problem