Parkerish cf-skinned fiver in progress
 

Here we go again. I'm making a fiver following the methods Parker makes their Fly-guitars; wood core with cf skin. First I glued the core out of obeche and maple. Body is full obeche, neck has center strip of maple.



Just your basic glueing, planing, sawing, routing and glueing again. Nothing fancy here.



Then it's time for carving the back. I'm carving only the back and neck at this time.



Obeche is easy to carve and sand. After carving it's time for cf skin. I didn't take any pics of the laminating because I had only about half an hour time to make the whole laminating before vacuum bagging the bass. It has 7 layers of 200g cf cloth on the neck and four on the back. Should be about 1,5mm cf skin on the neck and around 0,9mm on the back.



At the moment it's in my boiler room vacuum bagged and curing. I should be able to have a look at it later this evening or at least tomorrow morning.

Next step is to tidy up this laminate and carve the front for front laminating.
Marko

Ssssexy.

Very, very interesting. I like the shape and the neck-body transitions, quite a...speedy design (a.i. aerodynamic ;)). How much does it weight now and what are the predictions of final weight?

Wow. That's a sleek body shape, very nice. I assume this one'll be a headless as well?

Headless for sure. The core is very light and has a nice, ringing tone when held from the neck and tapped with knuckles. An hour and I' going to take the bass out of vacuum.

Just out of vacuum. It'll have to cure overnight before i can do anything. More tomorrow.

Nice design - I'm subbed! I have a Parker Hornet that has a wooden set-neck and the body is made of dense foam coated w/a (epoxy?) skin- not carbon fiber. It's very resonant tonally and surprisingly heavy (for foam). How did you determine the weave direction in your layering and how will it effect the tone?

Very cool!!!!

Here's the front. After carving it will have 1mm carbon skin. Here's how it is done.



Cf wetted.

Peel ply added

Bleed cloth on.

And finally bagged.



Will be out of vacuum tonight. Tomorrow it's time for cf layer under the fretboard.

I like the design but don't quite understand the point of the CF foil apart from looks.
I like the way it looks btw :).

It's not a cf foil. It's a laminated epoxy/cf skin, a bit like external skeleton. Cf makes the whole thing stiffer. With lightweight core the bass will be lighter and stiffer than one made of traditional tonewoods. Just another way of making a bass. Sound is also different compared to wooden one. Even sound thru the neck, longer sustain and clearer sound all over. That's from my experience with the basses I've made. No scientific data as proof, just my ears.

Hi.

Cool, as always :).

Regards
Sam

I'm curious about the process, how you get a clean result and all. I'm watching.

Subbed, nice to see a different take on bass building :smug:

Just took the bass out of vacuum. I said something about the core being resonant and having a nice tap tone. Well, now it's louder and rings longer. I'd say cf external skeleton has something to do with it.
The surface is not very smooth as the peel ply does not stretch to the curved shapes and if there is a wrinkle it will show. After light sanding there will be fill coats of epoxy before sanding the whole thing nice and smooth. The sides of the body will not have cf skin but they will be sealed with epoxy. I'm not sure if this one will have cf weave visible or if it will have a solid colour over it. I'm strongly leaning towards white on this one.

Have you ever considered doing a foam core with CF skin? I would think that you would be able to make a very light bass that way.

lowsound

Yes I have. My only concern is that foam may collapse under vacuum. There sure is foams that would work fine. So far I've been happy with light wood cores.