1st build, old cat, 8 string tapping instrument, mostly hand tools, great title hu?

[rwkeating]

Introduction


My first build is finally over. It took a very long time. Now I can sit back and write about it. It has been an adventure and I could never write about all that happened or put it in the correct time frame (nor would you want me to .) I’ll try and break it up into smaller parts and post one each day. There are more pictures in the later parts. I hope that my story can inspire anyone that has been on the fence about doing a build as I’ve been inspired by stories I’ve read here. If I can do it, you can do it!


Now that I’m and “old cat” (where did all the time go?,) I decided that I really needed to try and build an instrument while I still had a chance. My current instrument of choice is an NS/Stick (made by Stick Enterprises,) so I committed to build an 8 string tapping instrument. The 8 strings will be tuned like a 6 string bass with an additional 2 higher pitched strings so hopefully this build thread will be accepted in this forum.


The main things that I was going for on my 8 string instrument were 1) I wanted parallel strings with a string to string spacing of about 13/32” and 2) that the instrument would be headless (for the purpose of good balance.) Other than that I would have to see what developed. On a side note, many builds I see start with a body shape. I had no idea what body shape I would make and I wouldn’t know until very late in the build process.


I had some tools (not really woodworking tools) and no experience with woodworking. Oh, and I didn’t have a very big budget for the project. I was off to a perfect start! I did however have some very minimum experience leveling/dressing frets and that meant I actually had a real straight edge to use as a reference!


I started looking up information online and decided the hardest part of a build would be to make a flat surface as was needed between a fingerboard and neck (let alone other places I hadn’t even thought of.) I learned that to make two flat surfaces one used a planer and a jointer. When I saw how much those machines cost it was a hard blow. I couldn’t afford those. I hadn’t even started and I was already shot down. The end … just kidding, there is more.

 

[eightyearsapril]

Can't wait to read more! Subbed.

 

[yoshi]

Can't wait to see some pics!

 

[rwkeating]

Making It Affordable With Hand Tools


I found builds where people used hand tools! You could make a flat surface with a hand plane and it would cost less than using power tools! Cool! I had gotten a hand plane from my dad’s garage when he passed away. Well imagine my surprise when I found out there was more than one type of hand plane and surprise surprise, the one I had wasn’t the kind that I needed! Are you getting the idea of how unprepared I was for this?

I started going to garage sales to find planes. This was a slow process that only happened on the weekends. When I got one (a #4) I learned that I needed to work on it to get it in useable condition. That meant getting a flat surface. This was my first lesson “to make a flat surface, you need a flat surface.” Oh cruel fate, how you mock me!

I found out that a flat surface is called a surface plate. Wow, those are super expensive too! I looked for alternatives and found some people were using stone counter tops. I got one for free and checked it to make sure it really was flat enough (using my straight edge from fret work and some feeler gauges) and it was good enough according to what I had read online (and since I read it online it had to be true

I proceeded to flatten the bottom of the plane. That took a bunch of time, but at least I achieved results. Next I had to sharpen the blade (the iron.) That went nowhere as I couldn’t hold it at a consistent angle. I found that there were “jigs” to hold the iron at the correct angle, but the ones I saw were expensive. I decided that making my own jig wouldn’t be as good as a purchased one but it certainly would be better than holding the blade by hand. It worked! I could even shave the hair off of my arm (just like I saw in Youtube videos.) Now what was it I was supposed to be doing? Oh yeah, building an instrument, not making hair free girly arms.

I continued going to garage sales knowing that I needed a #5 plane and at least a #6 or #7. I was actually at a garage sale where a guy in his 70s reached for a #6 quicker than I could and bought it out from under me. Really? Did that really happen? Oh cruel fate, how you mock my very existence … once again. Actually, in the end I finished the build with nothing bigger than a #5 since I never found the others.

I practiced with my #4 plane trying to make two 2x6s flat and square to be used as a vise to mount on the front of my work bench. The workbench came with the house so I was lucky to have that. I was surprised at how relatively easy it was to make a flat surface and to make the 2 short sides parallel. I was really disappointed to see how hard it was (at least for me) to make the final side correct, but I continued to practice and got better.

In this next picture you can see my homemade scribe and the vise I made for the front of the work bench.

Next … some actual work on the instrument starts.

 

[rwkeating]

What? I’m Going to Have to Make My Own Hardware?


In the meantime I was investigating hardware for a headless design. I found that guitar hardware wouldn’t accept thick bass strings and bass hardware was too wide for the string spacing that I wanted. Game over. This is where my story ends … just kidding, there is more.


So I decided to design and make my own hardware. I came up with a design (subconsciously based on a combination of designs I’d seen on line) and proceeded with that. I found that aluminum was workable and I actually already had a tool that would help … a cheap Harbor Freight drill press. I read about working with aluminum and found there was an ideal drill speed and an ideal drill feed speed. Really? Everything is so complicated and thought out? Can’t I just crank up the drill and jam it into the aluminum? Well apparently not. So I had to figure all that out.

I wanted to buy a compound table for my drill press, but my drill press was too small. Instead I bought a vice for it and basically eyeballed the placement of parts. At least I avoided the temptation of holding them in place by hand


Although I had drills I didn’t have any taps. Well what a suprise, there are different kinds of taps (not just size differences.) So I found out what I needed and bought one.

In the end it all worked out. I was able to drill the holes without breaking any bits. For taping I had a tap handle (also from my dad’s old tools.) I used an old dremel tool to make the string holder holes larger for the bass string ends. The bit kept falling out (can you say dangerous?), but I got it to work more or less. At this point I didn’t really know how the string height screws would work, but I just had to move on and deal with that later. I didn’t complete these parts at this time but here is how they finally ended up. The first 3 pictures are of the string holders and the one bottom right is of the intonation blocks.

 

[yoshi]

Cool, good work so far!

I tried to make an aluminium headpiece for my fretless but ended up buying it instead: I didn't have a pillar drill and absolutely messed up the drilling with a hand one. Great R&D project though that I'll retry if/when I get a workshop.

FYI there's a lot of us on here that use hand tools, and some that even use only hand tools. Check out these two builds in particular:
0 some kind of bass.


And if you're interested, here's my most recent build, which includes the aluminium headpiece as mentioned above (I have a router, jigsaw, power drill, but the rest are hand tools).
www.talkbass.com/threads/yoshibass-2-a-headless-xmas-tree.1168011

 

[rwkeating]

Thanks for the links Yoshi. I'll check them out. I've seen Barnaby's builds. He is amazing.

 

[rwkeating]

Can I Please Start Working With Wood? Yes, If You Buy More Tools.

At this point (actually many times along the way) I stopped and had to remind myself that my goal was to build an instrument. So far everything I was doing, learning and reading seemed a million miles away from an actual instrument build.

I had a small saw but I knew I need a proper one. I was drawn in by videos of Japanese hand saws and how easy they looked to use (insert Oriental flute music here.) I bought one and started practicing. I couldn’t cut a straight line to save my life, but I did get better with practice.

For some reason I thought that the wood was going to be very expensive. I decided to find out by going to … hey, where do you even buy wood? Could it be a lumber store ??? I found a lumber store nearby and it is a glorious place. Anyway, depending on the wood you select it can be very expensive, but I was pleased to find out that it wasn’t going to break the bank if I selected wisely. I bought maple for the neck and a beautiful piece of maple for the fingerboard. The fingerboard wood was already cut to ¼” thick. Hurray! I looked at alder and poplar since those are common guitar woods and inexpensive. I went with alder because of what was available that day and the price was right.

I started planing the maple for the neck and cutting it to size. Since I had previously practiced on 2x4s, this went well and I was very excited. I started planing the ¼” maple fingerboard and disaster struck. The amount of tearout I was getting was incredible. Both sides were impossible for me to plane. I was quickly destroying the wood. It looked like a miniature version of the surface of the moon.

I went back to the lumber store and talked to a guy there about what happened. He told me that highly figured (pretty in my terms) wood like I bought for the fingerboard could be hard to work with. He recommended cepelia wood to me. I thought it looked nice, the price was right and it too was cut ¼” thick, so I went with that for the fingerboard.

It was time to think about routers since soon I would need to make a truss rod channel. All this time the router was the big ticket item that I was budgeting for. I had it all planned out when I started thinking of a router plane instead of a powered router. I tossed and turned over this but basically went with a router plane for the following reasons:.

1. lower cost long term,
   
   
2. working slower meant (hopefully) not destroying anything,
   
   
3. no need to make templates (had and have no idea how to do that anyway),
   
   
4. less dust, and
   
   
5. a bit safer.
   

Router planes are not common items nowadays so you either buy used or buy high end. I didn’t know anything about these so I felt uncomfortable buying them used, sight unseen on eBay and I knew I’d never find one at a garage sale (especially since garage sale season was ending for the year.) In the end I bought a Veritas router plane. I know, I know, that is like buying a teenage driver a Ferrari but I am truly humbled by having this wonderful high end tool.

As I like to do … I started practicing. I worked on my previous neck scraps making a truss rod channel (pictured on right.) You can see my horrible first attempt (picture upper left), but the second attempt was looking very good (picture lower left.)

Next ... work on the actual neck and fingerboard.

 

[rwkeating]

Fretting Over Fretting


It was time to cut the fret slots. Another nerve racking point in the build.

Let’s start with the frets. I wanted stainless frets and read online two points of view. One was that they were the hardest thing in the world to work with and the other that said those that couldn’t work with them where babies. I didn’t want to be a baby, so I bought some stainless frets Well, guess what. They are difficult to work with! They are so difficult that I ate the cost and ordered regular frets. Wah wah I’m a baby

I read about a Harbor Freight saw that was good for fret slots. Bought it and found it cut a slot that was too wide and the saw just wasn’t very good. I had it with buying things that didn’t work. I bought the StewMac fret saw with fret stop. I didn’t buy their fret cutting jig because of its width limitation. This meant I need to figure out how to cut the fret slots accurately.

I used a carpenters square to mark the fret slots. Instead of marking with pencil I just marked them with an awl. I kept carefully going over that mark making it deeper. Then I used the end of a hacksaw blade to make it wider. In little time I had a slot that would hold the fret saw so no fret slotting jig was needed. Although cutting the frets was successful, I never made peace with the Stewmac saw. It chattered a lot and it seemed to take forever to cut. They have a higher end one that may be better (I didn’t originally know that they had more than one.)

I was successful at making the truss rod channel in the real wood (since I had practiced.) I drilled an access hole and made a plug for the end of the truss rod. The plug fit well, but for some reason you can really see the outline of it when I finally glued it in and sanded it flat. Not sure why. Maybe it was dirty from something else that was on the sandpaper?

After making sure the neck and fretboard bottom were still flat, it was time to glue the fretboard on. I taped off the truss rod to not glue it in place, put on the glue and clamped it all together. In retrospect I should have used more glue. I swear I don’t know why there is a hammer in the following pictures.

The fretboard had a centerline and so did the neck. That is how I knew they were lined up correctly. I purposely cut the fingerboard wide since I figured it would be easier to plane off the extra instead of planing down the larger neck wood. That worked out very well and I even got to use that original plane that I mentioned earlier in the story!

I had previously practice rounding off the back of the neck using some scrap wood, so I knew what shape I wanted. The very back of the neck was going to be flat. The shape is basically a very flat “D” shape. This mean I could put the frets in even after I rounded the sides of the neck.

It was time to install the frets. I made sure the fingerboard was flat by sanding it (I had these flat bars and sticky sandpaper from previous fret work.) I didn’t have a coarse enough grit sandpaper, so the small correction in flattening that I had to do took forever.

I cut the tangs off the edge of the frets even though I wasn’t binding the neck. I later filled the end of the slots with sawdust and glue. It came out fine, but I don’t know if it was worth it or not.

I don’t like hammering in frets. Next time I’d like to make the slots bigger and just drop in the frets and glue them in. I know that is controversial.

 

[wraub]

OP- Please don't be offended by this, but you really have to update this thread faster.

 

[rwkeating]

No offense taken. It is being updated faster than if I was still doing the build so be glad for that Thanks for your interest! I do appreciate it.

 

[rwkeating]

The Body Shape? Uh … oh yeah.

For the longest time I had no idea about what the body would look like. I knew it would be minimal and small since the body on a tapping instrument plays less of a role than on a traditional guitar or bass. I had a few ideas. So I committed to at least a minimum width. That allowed me to move ahead with cutting the wood and gluing it together. I chose alder as it was a wood used early on by Fender and inexpensive. I also looked at popular, but the alder selection was better at the time I was at the lumber store.

Turns out the two pieces of wood moved all over the place due to the glue being so slippery. So I had to clean up that mess. I didn’t worry about the one end (where the bridge would go) as I knew that would have to be cut off later.

The plan was to make the bolt on neck pocket, bolt on the neck and to confirm where the bridge and tuner parts had to go. It was my first time using forstner drill bits. I like them!

It was time to make some more aluminum parts. I needed to make the neck end where the strings would clamp, the bracket for the tuners and the bracket for the intonation adjusters.

I knew that the bridge would have to be set into the body a bit in order to get the strings as low as I wanted them on the neck. The tuner tailpiece would need to be set in also, but I wasn’t sure how much.

Next ... the body shape ... really.

 

[daveman50]

Following this with interest. High entertainment value - you write well.

 

[rwkeating]

No, Really … The Body Shape?

It was time to commit to a body design given the width I had previously chosen. I cut curves out of paper, placed them on cardboard where they would go on the body and then cut them out to use as a template. I did one side and flipped it over to do the other side. The sides didn’t turn out even (I call it my asymmetrical design.) I still don’t know what went wrong and I still don’t know how you are really supposed to transfer a design to a body.

It was time to cut out the body. I actually had a coping saw from work I had previously done around the house. It seemed like a little saw for so much wood. The loop part was too small, but I made it work. Actually, the hardest part was keeping the blade at 90 degrees on the sides. I went out of my way to make sure any errors were done removing too little wood instead of too much. I then used as rasp and sandpaper to get down to the line.

I decided I didn’t like the sharp points on the sides and rounded them off after taking this next picture. The bottom obviously still has to be cut off but I need to wait to see exactly where.

 

[Jisch]

The sides didn’t turn out even (I call it my asymmetrical design.)

It's not a mistake, it's a feature - the story of my builds.

 

[rwkeating]

Never Been So Excited to Have Cavities

I thought it would be too tight to have just one cavity for the controls and battery, so I made two. It seemed like a nice solution at the time, but I was not thinking about tunnels for wiring and all that … oops. Another great idea I had was to save time and energy by removing as little wood as possible. That only made things harder! It would have been easier just to make a big hole rather than trying to precisely remove just what I had to. Yet another lesson learned. On the other hand I was glad to leave extra wood around the jack area for strength..

I had (and still have) no idea how to make nice rounded edges on the control cavities considering all my chisels are square! The best I could come up with is; find something that I could run the awl around over and over until I got a curved groove and then try and use the chisel to keep the curve that I established. In the first picture you can see a large socket (its for my car's oil filter) clamped to the body over the battery cavity. I thought the curve of that socket looked good and I didn’t have a lot of choices anyway. In the third picture you can see my first attempt at the curve on the control cavity prior to my “socket trick”, so I had to clean that up.

Remember the maple I was going to use as a fingerboard? Well it was still thick enough to cut and sand down for the control cavity covers. There was a ton of sanding to get them thin enough and then a bunch more to get them to fit. They are far from perfect, but they are real wood covers! I never had an instrument with real wood control covers before

 

[reverendrally]

All with hand tools? Impressive!

 

[rwkeating]

Thanks reverendarally. It is "mostly" with hand tools. For example, I used the drill press when I could (like for the original holes for the control cavity made with forstner bits.) I hope you have seen what the pros can do with hand tools. They are artists!

 

[rwkeating]

Strings, Pickups and Tunnels … oh my!

Finally time to put on some old strings to make sure things lined up as I had planned. At this point I think I had to sink the bridge and or the tuner plate a bit more.

The bridge height adjusters are screws with their tops flattened and frets epoxied on top. At the end of the neck the strings lock down with shaft locking collars. I would later realize the problem with the collars and the solution to that problem.

Next I put on a set of strings and made a holder to hold the pickup over the strings. I then moved it around so I could find where it sounded best At this point all of the electronics were left outside of the body. Note: If you’ve noticed the design flaw in this picture, well ... hold on … I’ll get to that later.

In making the pickup cavity I came across the same issue that I had with the control cavity covers ...how to carve curves. This time I couldn’t find anything to trace the awl around with the same curves as the pickup. So I drew around the pickup with a pencil and used a chisel on the straight parts. For the curves I just made a bunch of holes with the awl and slowly connected the holes until I got a curved channel. From there I just kept going until it was deep enough to use the chisel. If anyone can point me to how this should be properly done (with hand tools), please tell me!

Next came the tunnels for the wires. This was one of the scariest times of the build. I didn’t consider the tunnel location when choosing the cavity or pickup locations. Fortunately they were relatively close and I was able to get the angle I needed. I used an electric drill for this part. I didn’t need to overcomplicate things at this stage of the game. I still don’t know how I got it so perfect. I drilled from the control and battery cavities to the PU cavity. In the third picture you can see that I couldn’t have asked for better placement. In the last picture I was using a round file to make one of the tunnels bigger. Note the angle of the file vs. the pencil line on the side of the body. Good thing I didn’t follow my planned line or I would have wrecked the body. Next time I will try harder to have only one control cavity and make it close to the pickup cavity to cut down on the risk. Did I just write “next time”? Oh, oh.

 

[rwkeating]

I Might Not Be Able to Finish, but I Can Put On a Finish.

At this point I was ready to put a finish on the body. In the beginning I wanted to do a paint finish and learn about that process. I abandoned that idea because it got too cold to paint outside (and probably too cold to paint in the basement too.) I decided on Watco Danish oil as a finish. By this time I had already put a few coats of Watco natural finish on the neck and fingerboard. For the body I used Watco with a golden oak tint and wet sanded it into the body. Wet sanding Watco makes the wood really nice and smooth. I could have done more coats with even finer and finer sandpaper, but by now I was really anxious to wrap things up. I hung on all this time, but now I needed to know if I was looking at success or failure!

I don’t have any pictures of the finishing process but here is the neck ready for the finish.

While I was waiting between coats on the body, I made the strap bar. When I first saw a strap bar (I think it was on a Rick Turner bass) I thought it was kind of a “Band-Aid” solution, but you can’t argue with the incredible balance you can get by having that strap button in a proper location regardless of body shape!

The first picture shows what I saw/felt every time I started working with aluminum “this is never going to look good.” By the time I finished it actually looked okay.

I read that if you install the frets correctly that they wouldn’t need to be leveled and dressed. Guess who’s frets needed leveling and dressing? Ding ding ding, we have a winner.

Next ... final assembly.