Andyjr1515

Swifts are now in flight : And also started the tru-oil slurry and buff - at this stage more to show up better the lumpy bits, sandpaper scratches and dinks to get rid of in the final sanding. The dinks and scratches on the sapele here are all but invisible on the sanded wood. See how much it shows all the aberrations up: I also use tru-oil slurry and buff nowadays as the gap filler and grain filler all in one. The body will be finished in gloss Osmo Polyx (with which, unlike the semi-matt and satin, I've had some problems with before, although pretty sure it was me and not the Osmo...). I'm amazed how well the slurry and buff has filled the VERY hole-y camphor-laurel! In the meantime, final sanding has now started, getting rid of the above dinks and scratches and also rounding off some of the sharp or bumpy edges: I've set myself a target of end of next week for the basic build to be finished, with a week or so on top of that before the final polish... ...provided, of course, I don't make any last minute c**k-ups!

Certain I can make it. I'll bring: Kert's Camphor Single Cut Pete's EB3 Tribute Pete's Piccolo bass My 6-string electric version of the piccolo (which will be finished by then ) ...and of course, @scrumpymike will have his Rascal

I am going to use the same template for the headstock as I used for Tim's Alembic-esque build. First job is to add a couple of wings from offcut from the neck: I then coaxed my bandsaw to cut a couple of thin slices from some camphor-laurel offcut for the headstock plate and the control chamber cover: This is basically how the whole thing will look:

I like this very much. Very classy look to it and the build quality looks tip top

Thanks! And the present weight, by the way for anyone counting, is 4lbs 4oz.

To be honest, it's more about knowing your capabilities and when to, or not to, wade in with the size 12's Especially when you take what would be a perfectly acceptable neck and then do THIS with it! But, with a bit more work, it became this: Then, with still a bit of fine-tuning to do, it started getting to where I think I was trying to take it: I could cut deeper than this, but to be honest, from a playing point of view, this gets me up to the 22nd fret with not the slightest feeling on the fretting thumb that I've reached the body . I'm going to classify that as 'objective met'

Not really, I suspect, Mick I'll post a shot of the work-in-progress shortly - even when I squint my eyes I can't see any swifts

The nice thing about building a guitar for your own use is that you can experiment and test out concepts. If you remember, the primary objective of this guitar was for it to be light, and yet look fairly conventional and play well. Presently, it weighs 4lb 5oz which, for a 25" through-neck, isn't too bad. The upper fret thumb transition at the heel is also better than many comparable designs, simply because of the slimness of the body. But I'm hoping for a little bit more. I want to take Tim's Alembic-esque back carve a touch further. If you remember, Tim's is like this: It aims to give clearance to the hypothenor (?) - the bit of your palm opposite your thumb joint...think old fashioned karate film clips - when your left hand is trying to reach the upper frets. With this build, I'm going to go one stage further. Do you remember on Mick's Psilos bass where I partially continued the fretboard radius into the top horn of the bass (always an issue with a single cut bass)?: Well, I'm going to try to combine those two concepts by continuing the neck profile carve of the lower cutaway up to the 22nd fret itself: This lower one will be quite deep at the neck. The carve will be matched with a shallower version on the upper cutaway, for more visual rather then functional reasons: I don't really have the perfect carving tools (or the talent!) to do this - and I'm hopeless at pre-imagining what the shapes will do all around -and so will take it very slowly. Probably will take me the rest of the day. One quite pretty BBQ log coming up!

Love that! Great job

Yes - for flat surfaces you do need to bend them to create a smaller contact area for cutting. Hence me having the same problem. With the convex curve of the neck, however, you naturally have a point contact so don't need to bend it. And yes - goose neck's are b******s to re-burnish!

Actually, for a neck you generally don't need to bend it. I certainly don't - just use it straight. However, if I'm using the scrapers for flat surfaces I find them a bit more problematic for the same reason and tend to use a jack plane where I can. I've never tried the (Veritas?) scraper holder - but it looks good and IIRC allows setting the curve with a thumbscrew like the old fashioned scraper-plane's (which are also worth having a look out for on ebay).

When I build guitars and basses for other people, I get them to send me the profile measurements and shapes for their favourite neck. While every guitar has its own feel, the objective is to at least create a familiarity in the playing of the new one. With my creeping hand arthritis, this is particularly important for this guitar, which is being built for my own use, because I have guitars now that I can no longer play. So out comes my most comfortable neck and my £2 Wilko carpenters profile gauge and a bit of old notepad cover and I have my profile templates : Each to his own, but for neck carving, my preferred tools are spokeshave for rough bulk removal and the humble cabinet scraper for the main carve: You can see the size of the shavings from the spokeshave - brutal stuff. So that really is, for me, just about taking the corners off. Many of the experienced builders use cabinet scrapers, but if you never have: Buy a set (a few £'s in Homebase, B&Q for starters) Learn how to re-burnish them (they will come already burnished for initial use) Try it! They act like a mini plane. These are the type of shavings from this morning: They can remove wood remarkably quickly - but very, very controllably. This avoids every neck-carver's nightmare - taking too much off! You can literally creep up to your target shape and size. Final tool I use, just for the awkward bits round the volute and neck/body join is a fine curved micro-plane blade (mine comes from Axminster). Wearing gloves, I use the microplane two-handed, a bit like a scraper. This gives me maximum control: I will spend the rest of the day finishing this off, but between washing up the breakfast pots and coffee time - and including re-burnishing the cabinet scrapers - the neck went from a 3-4mm oversize rectangular block to this: As always, thanks for looking

Yup - I'm in Basschat calendar updated.

Great! If I work out ways of improving it, I'll post the changes

Rather than do the documentary-makers favourite ploy of artificially creating drama with the 'and all was going well....and then they hit a serious problem!' yawn approach, let's just say: It worked The snakewood was fine There were, however, a couple of builder and user errors in the live trial. As a precaution, I worked out that with the thickness of the snakewood I would be able to try two or even three passes, so I deliberately started on the thickish side rather than trying for finished thickness first go. Good job I did! First I tried routing lengthways and indexing at each pass. Very easy VERY quick But unexpected groove steps at the edge of two of three of the passes (didn't take a photo!! ) Wasn't sure why that was happening. Second go, I changed to routing the radius and indexing manually each pass along the length. Took a bit longer but still very easy But.... "Hmmm...that's odd" : Perfect at the sides but digging in in the middle?? Then realised that the two unexpected results were linked:- Basically, the two radius templates are probably not quite identical. One of them is higher in the portion at the top of the radius. Result - the carriage will therefore tip and so the router bit is now angled and hence it digs in along one edge. It's easily fixed and was acually less serious than it looked - 10 mins with the sanding block gave me this: The second issue was pure rooky operator error. Once I got into the joy of each of the 100 passes of 'zip, index, zip' I forgot. I forgot that this, of course, is still a satanic router! And instead of slowing my cut feed right down at the far end (which normally I would do) - I just zapped past the finish mark at the same speed as the previous 100 passes. And *PING* ...the very last cut of the very last edge pinged off a 15cm sliver of snakewood off the side. Luckily , this was an un-slotted fingerboard and so this became the nut end. Could have been a disaster and I should have known better! But, with a couple of tweaks of the jig itself on the radius templates and some self-flagellation for being an idiot, I declared the rig a success! And a couple of days later, this was what the fretboard blank looked like - whereas, before, I would have still been sanding! :

So - before subjecting my beautiful and eye-wateringly expensive piece of snakewood to the devilish and destructive router bit - I thought I'd better try it out on some scrap maple. It seemed to work! And the radius did, indeed, seem to be correct One challenge was that I would need a decent selection of flat spacer lengths to raise the blank to pretty much the exact height...because lowering or raising the router bit will, of course, change the radius. The other thing noted was that the visibility was pretty limited. I used one of the spare Bosch palm router holders that comes with the kit - it's the one that nobody uses that can hold the router at an angle (does ANYONE use that one?????) and maybe the standard base would give a bit more visibility. Anyway - it worked So...onto the eyewateringly expensive snakewood!

@BigRedX & @Jimothey - thread started on the radiussing rig here

The idea of LedBelliBass's original design was to allow both routing each radius strip then index along the length AND alternatively routing along the length of the fretboard, indexing round the curve at each pass. Because I wasn't sure what would be easiest, I decided to allow the same. My base was an old IKEA box shelf. Dead-flat, quite light to handle, just the right width (by pure fluke) and melamine covered so actually quite slippy. All it needed, therefore, was a couple of pine strips glued along the length at the same distance apart as the bottom carrier: I also guessed that if I was doing the multile lengthways passes, I would need to index it relatively securely - so I just drilled a hole in the bottom carrier and, indexing the top carriage by 1/4 of a router bit's width at a time, drilled through to the top carriage to use an old drill (not the breakable cocktail stick shown in the photo!) to hold it in position: Those of you much cleverer than me will have worked out that these holes will only work with one radius template pair. Correct - I will drill another peg hole and indexing holes, above or below, for each different radius I use. Next post I'll let you know how the prototyping went...

I mentioned this jig in my 'Piccolo gains two strings' thread and a couple of you were interested in a bit more detail. I have come to the conclusion that life is too short to hand sand fretboards. Challenges include: It's bloody hard work Even with all of the precautions, tips and tricks employed, it is still too easy to end up with a board that is either thinner one side than the other or uneven or dipping at one end or another The Alembic-esque 6 string electric recently completed nearly did for it and me! A brittle figured ebony bond. Took my time (did it over 3 days!), used chalk to ensure evenness, used a guide rail for the radius block, regular checks. And it STILL ended up a mm slimmer on the treble side than the bass!!! And it absolutely killed my increasingly arthritic hands. So I shamelessly stole and modified a design I'd seen a photo on Google Images by LedBelliBass, originally posted on the HomemadeTools.net website. This is the finished article in use: Basically, the router is bolted to a ball-bearing fitted tray, which itself sits on a simple carrier - which has radius templates either side. Here's the router tray: As you can see, the radius templates are detachable, making it easy to fit alternative templates with alternative radii on. For those with good eyesite, the template fitted is 11" radius but - because the router bit is going to be an inch lower than this - it will actually rout a 10" radius on the fretboard. Similarly, the second set you see on the right of the picture is radiussed at 13" to produce a 12" fretboard curve. Now - on LedBelliBass's original, the bottom carriage also ran on ball bearings, to to me, that seems to be too free moving...and I hate routers to be too free moving! Next post, I'll show the simple rig I used for the lengthways movement

Yup - these were (almost literally) out of this world

Frets are in and body carve pretty much there. Current weight stands at 4lbs 10oz Next job is neck carve...

Another one of @Jabba_the_gut 's is my nomination: Made mostly from 'bits of timber found in a skip', if I remember correctly and unbelievably well crafted. This was the one bass I REALLY wanted to take home at the SE Basschat Bash. In fact, if Jez hadn't been looking....

Yes, @Jimothey I'll do a separate thread if anyone's interested. At the moment, I've done templates for 10" and 12" radius, but it would be easy enough to add more.

You're all too kind but some would say that my secret is merely having just the right balance between drugs and drink.

So - this morning saw me checking the flatness of the neck top and chiselling out the top where the fretboard will sit in: Then, remember the mantra - YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MANY CLAMPS : And that got me to here: And this @Jabba_the_gut , if it's of any interest, is how the binding worked out. Don't know why I didn't think of it before! :