Headless fretless four-string

[Mediocre Polymath]

In my write up of my home-made fretted bass, I mentioned that the original neck I mad earmarked for it was damaged by a badly behaved bandsaw. This is the story of what I did with that damaged neck blank.

 

For about two years, that neck blank sat propped up against the wall in the attic. I had a vague idea of making a headless bass with it, even though I've never been a huge fan of headless instruments (this is before their sudden renaissance really got going). However, I'd looked at how much decent headless bass hardware cost and scampered away with my tail between my legs. (A Hipshot bridge/headpiece set costs like £400, which was more than I was planning on spending on the whole project).

 

Then, one day, I stumbled across someone (perhaps of this parish) selling a set of ABM individual bridge-tuner units and a hand-made brass headpiece for £100 on eBay. I snapped them up because that's about £200 less than they would have cost new, and this was during the pandemic, so no-one had new ones in stock anyway.

 

 

With this stuff delivered, I made some measurements and started working on a design. My main priority was that I wanted to have the tuners easily acessible without having them hanging off the back, or having the body cut inwards to make them acessible. Like the odd annulus things on some Alembics – I've always thought those access cutaways give your bass a sort of flabby cloaca thing.

 

Below is the design I settled on. My thinking was that without a headstock to counterbalance, I could dispense with the top horn, and if I followed the staggered angle of the bridge units with the lower edge of the body, I could handle tuner accessibility with a routed-out recess. The little shape in the upper bout was going to be either an inlay or a soundhole-like thing – I hadn't decided which, but I felt it needed something there for visual balance.

 

The idea was that this would be a two-piece ash body with a walnut top. The ash would be chambered to keep the weight down. It was to have simple passive electronics and cheap jazz pickups because I wasn't sure about the integrity of headpiece, and didn't know how I'd go about replacing it if it didn't work, so I bought all my parts with the possibility in mind that the whole thing might be a bust.

 

I'll continue this tomorrow, but I should note up top that I took far fewer pictures of the process of making this bass than I did with my other one. I think this was because it was the spring of 2021, and I was in an Omicron-lockdown fugue state. That means this write-up will probably be a bit more concise than the last one (it didn't require a "15 years earlier" prologue, so that's a good start). 

[SpondonBassed]

  

17 hours ago, Mediocre Polymath said:

Like the odd annulus things on some Alembics – I've always thought those access cutaways give your bass a sort of flabby cloaca thing.

 

 

This has BassChat's Famous Quotes written all over it.

[Mediocre Polymath]

Righty then. On to the actual making of stuff.

 

The first job was to cut the damaged headstock off the neck blank, which I did with a tenon saw, and to plane down the fingerboard. The neck already had its truss rod channel routed into it, but because the brass headpiece had its truss rod access hole in completely the wrong place (the reason, I suspect, why whatever project it was made for got abandoned), I plugged the headstock end of the channel with a piece cut from the scrap headstock and opened it out at the bottom for a wheel-type body-end adjuster.

 

 

The fingerboard was a piece of Pao Ferro I'd bought on clearance and forgotten about. I planed it flat and cut the fret slots into it. I had no intention of putting frets in, but I like my fretless basses lined. Unlined fingerboards just feel like making life unecessarily hard for yourself. I marked out the board for cutting by printing the neck section of my technical drawings, taping them to the board using a centreline for alignment, and then scoring through the paper to mark positions. I cut them using a straight-edge and a fretting saw.

 

 

After the neck was roughed out, I started work on the body. This is the bit where the lack of pictures is annoying, as the construction process here was quite clever. When I was designing this bass, I knew that I wasn't going to be able to go up to my wife's workshop to use the routers or pillar drills. As a result, the body had to be planned out with my limited tools in in mind – whatever I came up with would have to be doable with just a jigsaw, small drill-stand and chisels.

 

I knew the drill stand wouldn't reach to the centre of the body, and I couldn't freehand things like bridge mounting holes and pickup routs, so I designed the body so that the two halves would only be joined together after all that stuff have been done.

 

 

This is my blueprint for one of the body halves against the dimensions of the board it was to be cut out from. The vertical dotted lines are the location of the dowels I'd drilled laterally through to keep the halves aligned. (They didn't actually go all the way through, obviously).

 

 

This picture is from the process of drilling the chambering into one of the body halves before I glued it up. It's about the only actual picture I have of the process.

 

 

This is the finished body with the dry-fitted neck. The marks left by the drill show you clearly how I made those routs. The recess for the tuner access was roughed out with forstner bits, and then tidied up with a mixture of chisels, gouges and a massive amount of sanding. So much sanding.

[Mediocre Polymath]

Right. Last part.

 

I noticed when I was looking back at what I posted yesterday that the last picture doesn't quite show the body in its finished state. The upper bout inlay was missing. I now remember that it took me a week or two of procrastinating before I bit the bullet and actually carved that out. I was scared of screwing up the lovely walnut top after every other step in the process had gone so unexpectedly well.

 

As it turned out, the process was fine. I used various sizes of drill bits to do the radiused corners, and to remove the bulk of the area that the inlay would cover. I then used small chisels and gouges to tidy up the edges. There's a wee bit of filler in one spot to cover the effect of an uncooperative bit of grain, but it otherwise went well. The inlay material itself is cut from a ~3-mm-thick offcut of ash I had lying around. Here's a picture taken during the finishing process.

 

 

As with my other instruments, this is polyurethane lacquer applied with a brush and then later sanded down. I used the same lacquer on the neck, though I masked off the fingerboard. The reflective finish in this picture is actually just very hard wood that has been planed and sanded to a gloss finish. (I forgot to sand the saw marks off the bottom of the neck blank before I stuck the truss rod in, but it's not visible in the assembled bass.)

 

 

Here's the finished bass. It has a pair of StewMac Golden Age jazz bass pickups (because they were on sale when I was buying some other things) and a basic vol-vol-tone control layout. The head-piece has turned out to be plenty strong enough to hold the strings in place.

 

 

Here's view of the back, showing the control cover which I made from the same ash offcut as the inlay on the front. It's actually from a totally different batch of timber, but the grain matches surprisingly well.

 

 

I had it set up with D'Addario half-rounds initially, but found them to be very dull-sounding. More flatwound than roundwound, I think. From the moment I first plugged it in, I knew that it blew my old Warwick Corvette fretless out of the water (not least because it was about a kilo lighter and didn't neck dive). Nicer feeling neck, lower action, clearer sound – the Warwick went straight to the Bass Gallery, who sold it on consignment a few months later.

 

As a postscript, about a year after it was finished I was down in Brighton seeing some friends, and popped into GAK because I wanted to try out a Trace Elliot Elf. After noodling around for a while, I asked if they had a fretless I could try it with. The clerk gave me the only fretless they had in stock, which was – oddly – a Fender Custom Shop Tony Franklin signature.

 

The neck and feel of this bass was a transcendental experience, and I realised that I'd set the bar too low by merely going for "better than my Warwick". When I got home, I removed the neck and reprofiled the fingerboard. I lacquered it with a layer of superglue (poor man's epoxy) and obsessively sanded and polished it until the neck was perfectly flat. I'm still not quite sure if I've managed to match that Tony Franklin bass, but I think I'm close enough that I don't mind the difference.

 

Since then this has been my main at-home bass. I play my fretted bass in bands, because that's where the money notes are, but this is the one I reach for when I'm practicing and keep on a stand next to my desk.

 

I'm considering spending some money this year on updating the electronics, just because they're not really up to the same standard of quality as the rest of the instrument. I'm tempted to go for some beefy DiMarzios or Bartolinis, and perhaps try out one of those Lusithand filter preamps, as they seem interesting. Anyone have any experience with those?

Edited March 28 by Mediocre Polymath

[BassTool]

Nice work 👍🏼

[lemmywinks]

Great build and write up!