Andyjr1515

Bit of tidying up to do, but I think this is pretty close to plan. You can tell by the artificial light that it's taken all day : You can see the angle here by looking where the upper cutaway angles where it joins the neck Here's the back - again, pending a bit of tidying up of the joints:

And some!

Next step is to tweak the width of the neck pocket, ensuring that it is central and that the centre line of the neck matches the centre line of the body (which happily, and to my great surprise, it does!): The next step is going to be to rout a slot, at the 2 degree angle, to allow the neck to drop down until the top of the neck is flush with the top of the body , the neck is sitting at 2 degrees downwards and that the join at the heel is tight against the bottom cutaway of the body. Might have to go and have a cup of tea before I tackle THAT little lot....

Still rock-hopping a little because now I've worked out how I will do the body carve, but before I actually do it, I need to get the basic neck fit in place. And to do that I need to know what neck angle I'm going for. So I have tapered the fretboard to within a couple of mm of finish size, flipped it round so that the narrow end (nut end) fits in the neck pocket enough to pivot on the top of the body and put a straight edge flat on the board in a straight line to the bridge slots (with all bridge adjustment flat to the floor). Then the angle the fretboard is at, is the angle the neck needs to be fit to, which is just a touch over 2 degrees: And now I just need to work out how to machine the various cuts and fits at the end of the neck to incorporate that angle with an exact fit on all planes. Hmmmm... I may be some time!

Yes - i think the ziricote is the icing on the cake. That fretboard looks utterly splendid!

Yes - usually it is that the bottom of the saddle isn't completely flat on the piezo, or that it is sticking slightly in the slot and therefore the full string pressure isn't being transfered to the piezo. It is probable that you've sanded a slight curve in the bottom of the saddle and so now the two bass strings are not fully seating on the piezo. Take the saddle out, sellotape a thin strip of fine sandpaper to a worktop and hold the saddle against something square like a matchbox or similar to sand along the sandpaper in a straight line parallel to the sanpaper, taking care not to sand a curve at either end. It won't need much. Check the flatness on the worktop and the squareness visually, looking end on down the length from either end. Finally check that the saddle slides to the bottom of the slot and that the piezo extends for the whole length of the slot and that there is nothing in the slot stopping the saddle sitting flat. Hope this helps

As with @eude 's project, family commitments will halt progress on this for a few days but did get to finish off the rear carve. This is how it's looking: The top will be curved broadly parallel to this shape. I'll leave the neck until later because that will change from concave to convex as it approaches the heel. I'm hoping that my 'S' grain for the two wings and differing grain patterns works once the contrasting control chamber cover is there. It's something you can't do on the neck because you can get differential movement of the wood but, structurally, the wings will be fine. We'll see if I'm right or not about the visuals once the whole thing is finished

Rock hopping a little bit on this. Carbon rods and truss rod are on order and I've got a few days of family commitment coming up (I know.... ) so thought I'd just start a fill in job - working out the best way to carve the body. Although I have one of these: ...I'm not letting that anywhere near the body. Too possible to wreck it! But the katalox is tough stuff and the ash is, well, ash. I tried a concave spokeshave, scrapers, micro-planes, Shinto rasp and sanding. And concluded that it needed all of those! Full curve not yet achieved but I think that combination is probably the way based on how it's going so far: So no more progress likely until well into next week but then I have a fairly clear stretch

There's the old saying of if it looks right, it probably is right. This looks very right

That's lovely

Looking great

I'm sure Mike will be posting the links anyway, but Gillett Guitars have just posted this - shows my own Rocklite and the production Mahogany versions of the Contour 6 string in comparison - and played by a fantastic player, Ben Fletcher:

Great blog, Silvia Thanks for all the hard work.

That's enough of an upper body workout for one evening! Starting to get there, though:

Excellent! On both counts

Well - I've got nothing to compare a 31.5" scale with but it certainly doesn't match my 34" bass, nor my 25.5" guitar, or my 24.75" guitar, or even my alto sax - so I presume it's right! @eude was after some lighter figure in the ebony. This should do nicely. This is where the fretboard will come to at its full 24 fret lines and a bit: Quite a bit of next week is going to be a bit of a disaster time-wise but before then I should at least have got my head around the neck angles, etc, to be able to start working on the heel.

Cutting frets by hand on a wide ebony board is b****y hard work! I'm about halfway through and having a rest Using the Stewmac on-line calculator, I marked carefully with a tiny pinhole each position - always from the nut. To double check, I then measured the dot to dot lengths against the calculators 'fret to fret' measurements. Happily, they matched! Then got the G&W mitre block out. These are the pin dots: The types of clamps I use on my bench are great for this rig, but they do tend to drag the board slightly as you tighten. It doesn't affect it when you are using a template, but with this it can drag it a couple of 10ths of a mm. So for each position, with a lamp shining directly down the blade, I tightened the two clamps until the dot disappeared from both sides of the blade. Then I knew the blade would be directly over the marker: The other thing I do is fit a couple of sized packers to fully fit the width of the jig. With a wood like this, the saw even pulls my heavy workbench away from the wall so, without packers, the fretboard can easily loosen from under the clamps. Eleven slots done. I'm going to have a cup of tea and then get down to the rest of them Andy

And it's time to start doing actual stuff preparing the neck. There's also a bit of buying - the carbon rods and a suitable router bit to cut the slots. First thing was working out what size of rods. Anyone who has cut a neck at the nut or seen a neck break will know just how little wood is actually there. @eude would like me to get to a similar feel to his favourite 6 string bass in terms of slimness, which is 22.5mm running up to 23.5mm. What I do is to draw full-size the cross section, with 'don't go beyond lines' to see how much leeway there is: 22.5mm with a 10mm fretboard (could be slimmer but I think I might stick with this) leaves 12.5mm maximum depth of wood. Cutting out the slot for the trussrod leaves 3.5mm wood underneath the rod in the middle and a touch less either side. That should be enough to prevent the rod bursting out of the bottom to say hello But it's a wide, slim profile so I have to be careful with the position and depth of the rods. I'll take the rods up to the 1st fret and have concluded that 4mmx4mm rods should give me what I need with a margin of error laterally and vertically. That done the rods and router bit are on order. Because it is going to be a flush-fitted heel, the neck angle will have to be set into the cutting of the tenon and heel - a bit like an acoustic. Therefore, the neck angle needs to be known pretty well before those surfaces are cut. Therefore, the sequence I am going in is: Fretline and top finish the fretboard. Then I know exactly what thickness it is Work out the required neck angle using full-size drawing and double checking with actual mockup Cut the heel Based on that, todays job is marking out and cutting the fret slots

I rout the weight relief chambers once I've carved out the back and know how deep I can go. It would be embarrassing to rout through into fresh air! Starting with the lower wing, I started with a No 5 Stanley plane: Then started the curve with my Veritas pull-shave Then put my newly acquired Ibex thumb plane into action. They are diddy and quite expensive, but they are brilliant! That's got the bulk out. Tomorrow, I will deepen the curve, then start on the upper wing. Finally, I will smooth it all off with a swan-neck cabinet scraper

Welcome back! I'm sure it won't take you long to brush off any remaining unwellness and get back into the swing

Yes - good suggestion. Taking old guitars and basses to bits makes you realise how many times oopsies appear in hidden places

And now both back wings are glued to the through-neck and are level with it so that the whole surface now incorporates the neck angle: Once all of the chambering and control cable routes have been sorted, the top will then glue onto the flat surface, and flush with the top of the neck: In between the two is another layer of 0.6mm veneer: So why bother bookmatching the veneer when no one will ever see it? Well, gosh - a chap's got to keep up certain standards, don't you know!

Can't wait!

If you are referring to the London Plane Tree version of Lacewood (I think there are a few species called that?) then the photo of the Sycamore looks very close. The London Plane Tree is apparently closely related to the American Sycamore and might even be a hybrid of it. Whatever, I think Mick's chart is from exotichardwoodsukltd - and that's where I got this from below, so they certainly do hold it sometimes:

Looks a great design! And some nice woods Just a detail to watch out for - cocobolo is a stunningly beautiful wood but is VERY oily. Even with acetone wiping before gluing, I couldn't get titebond to hold it tight and ended up using Z-poxy to glue the structural pieces. Also, when filing or sanding, you need to steel brush the file or sanding block frequently as it gums up very quickly! But, the result will be worth it. Look forward very much to seeing this one progress Andy