Here's another one, more or less concurrent with
my 8-string build. This one is an "experimental" build, as it's something that I'm not exactly sure about, but, well, you never know until you try, right?
Specs:
Ash/purpleheart body
3-piece maple bolt-on neck with ash/purpleheart headstock
Pau Ferro fingerboard, 22/24 frets
34" scale 5-string, 46mm at nut, 17mm spacing at bridge
Electronics to be disclosed pending successful testing
It started with an ash/purpleheart body blank that I scored from eBay for a song. It's two wide sections of ash, with a purpleheart stripe down the center, and two sections of purpleheart on the top and bottom. I bought it not exactly knowing what I would do with it, but it was too cheap to pass up.
The stark contrast between the ash and the purpleheart finally began to suggest to me that I should pursue something of a rectangular body shape. So many people build organic bodies, and I certainly like them a lot, but for whatever reason I didn't think that the racing stripes would gel too well with a curvy shape.
So I started with my own interpretation of the Steinberger Spirit shape, with some Kubicki thrown in as well:
The neck started out as a single quartersawn piece of rock maple, with a nice large rectangle of purpleheart grafted on as the headstock. But I muffed up the truss rod route (bit slipped), so I ripped the center section out and grafted a new one in. This time I used some of the offcut of the body for the headstock.
In keeping with the rectangular theme, I trimmed the end of the fingerboard to have 24 frets for the top three strings, and 22 for the bottom two:
Likewise the headstock shape:
The tuners are Grover wavy Titans, scored here and completely cool! There is just barely room on the headstock for them:
Next steps for this one are radiusing the fingerboard, inlaying and fretting, and shaping the neck.
