Andyjr1515

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

Ah, but there are Standards to keep up, my boy. Standards! Anyway, thankfully insulating is done for the day - and don't you just love the glass fibre prickles of the 'low irritation' modern insulation rolls OK - hopefully this below illustrates where I'm coming from. Both are drawn to the same scale. The top one is an example of the hybrid approach and the bottom one is a typical bolt-on design: The advantage is that, theoretically, the body can be as thin as the neck itself. This is the great advantage of a through-neck too, where you can achieve this or just a much smoother transition at the upper frets. BUT, as you can see, the disadvantage is that there is a shorter length of neck in the pocket itself, and the thickness of the neck at the pocket is much reduced. - To compensate for the shorter pocket, my solution is to use machine screws and inserts - allowing much tighter clamping forces than the normal woodscrews - To compensate for the thinness of the neck at the pocket - and the risk of it breaking - there are two approaches discussed above: * Adding the biscuit joint to limit any bending movement putting stress on the corner circled * @Stub Mandrel 's good engineering approach which recognises that sharp corners promote splits when put under force (the original De Havilland Comet had just this problem with square windows leading to a number of catastrophic crashes) and the solution, which is to add a radius which spreads the stress and reduces the propensity to crack. In the case of the DH Comet, they changed to round windows. In the case of @Stub Mandrel 's suggestion, it is to add a small radius here: Hope the above makes some sense!

Yes you can I'm battling with trying to insulate a 120 year old loft space at the moment, but when I've done for the day, I'll draw you a comparison. If you think of a heel of, say, a P bass, basically this gets rid of the 3/4" lump of wood your thumb would normally hit where the neck meets the body. And that means you can take at least 3/4" off the thickness of the body. I'll draw you a pic as requested.

I like that very much!

Hmmm...I was going to go for a totally different look (see next post) but it's tempting. I'll drop you a PM

In terms of the neck joint, this was the one I did for @eude 's 6-stringer. I cut a fairly standard neck-pocket in the top (underneath in this shot, then an 'L' shaped cut for a half-tenon in the neck: Note also the little feature added - an ebony biscuit joint in the middle. This was actually my safety feature for similar issues that @Stub Mandrel refers too - although in this case it was to prevent the joint failing through the additional tension of a 6 string bass rather than a knock. The idea is that the biscuit takes the force and doesn't allow the joint itself to be strained. I'll probably do both in Tom's - the radius that @Stub Mandrel suggests and a similar biscuit to this. Back to @eude 's, the neck then was attached with machine screws and inserts and the heel sanded flush with the body: As @eude says, it worked quite well - giving the advantages of both through and bolt-on necks without - pretty much - any of the disadvantages of either Anyways, spurred on by beiginners luck, I'm going to try it again

Decent question, Mick, but because it's been carved specially for Tom by his African drum-maker contacts, I wanted to use it as made if at all possible.

It's early days, and there are some aspects I'm not completely decided yet, but these are the early thoughts. I had most of the day without electricity today, so spent quite a bit of time at the table next to a large window with paper, pencil and set-square. On of the challenges is that - although this wood seems much more homogenous than the previous one, at 25mm, it is quite thin. But, I MIGHT go bolt-on all the same. Using the body as my full-size template, this is where I got to during the day: Those of you who remember @eude 's 6 stringer last year might recognise this flush-heel joint I developed for that one: And those who remember the Tom's African Bass I might remember the headstock. Volute especially for you-know-who: Tom generally prefers smaller scale - originally pitching for 32" But...hmmm...not drawn up yet...but what about multiscale? And Tom says "YES" So I'll be drawing a 33" - 31" multi-scale tweak in the next couple of days...

Anyone remember Tom's ( our very own @wwcringe ) African Build? Turning a wavy, cracking, variable hardness, unknown species and less than an inch thick body, presented to him by African drum-maker contacts of his in (I think) The Gambia: Into this fretless through-neck: Which he played later that year at the Mayor of London's Show in Trafalgar Square?: Well - they've presented him with another one: And before you ask....of course I said yes

I think you are right to have doubts. Yes, there will be some electric pickups that are eq'd very specifically, but most will work just fine. @scrumpymike 's original and modified Fender Rascal has 6-string electric single coil lipsticks - and that sounds great!

I generally would, simply because then the bottom of the slot is going to be the nut height so you can be sure where it's going to be regardless of the string. Having said that, for a tryout for a string gauge that you might not stick with, initially I would probably leave the slot alone unless it was sitting so high that you can't judge if it's a keeper or not.