Build #2: Azshara

[funkinbottom]

Diggin' the design. Look forward to seeing this come together.

Not even joking. I don’t own a bandsaw, only a jigsaw. Some of my tools are very nice, but they’re all parked in the shed. When they’re needed, I haul them across the lawn. I’m limited to good weather and daylight, which is why I’m only starting to cook this baby now. (Winter in Norcal is almost over.)

I'm in similar situation. No bandsaw or planer, just a router and jigsaw, so I love a guerrilla build. Always fun to see how others improvise with alternative methods using a limited tool selection. I see you're in N CA.
I'm in Sonoma County, an hour or so north of San Francisco. Where abouts are you?

 

[FretsAreFor]

I'm in Marin. Ahoy, neighbor!

<engage Yorkshire accent>
An indoor workshop!? LUXURY.

 

[ArtGuy9516]

My workshop was a shoe box in the middle of the road

 

[FretsAreFor]

Much neck work to report.

First, a money shot of the truss channel.

Fast-forward a bit. After shaping the neck (but not the headstock) and hogging out the pocket, we have something that looks rather bassish.

I made my first set of BruceBars™, which was lots of fun. (If you don't know the term: these are Bruce Johnson's innovation. They get epoxied in below the fingerboard, and act as super-powered threaded inserts for attaching the neck.)

My neck was thick enough that I was able to slice off a couple of sets of coasters!

I then attached the fingerboard and cut the nut slot while it was still square. I then routed it to the neck.

So I bought a new router for this project. Until now, all of my routing was done with a handheld trim router. My new one is a Dewalt 1/2" beast. I love it, but it has twice the power of the trim router.

I mention this because I learned a hard lesson on this neck. Previously, I was able to climb-cut when going into the grain to avoid splintering. Well, not with this router. Between the power and the bigger bit, climb cutting just isn't gentle enough. From now on, I'll need to flip the board more often to ensure that I'm always going against the grain.

I present you with the wounded fingerboard.

I'm not terribly concerned; a fix is already mostly done. But still, bummer.

Lastly, I made my first set of pickup housings. This excites me more than it should.

 

[FretsAreFor]

The title of this post is

MORE DOTS

So I'll just start with a pic of the fingerboard as it stands now.

A few things to say about this. First, the dots on the fingerboard are all brass. The large side dots are Luminlay, and the small ones are brass. They will all show up much better once the board is finished.

(I absolutely loathe the color of bubinga. This will be getting dyed a rich chocolate color, which will pop the dots and otherwise look amazing.)

Also, if you look closely at the 12th-14th fret, you can see where I fixed my routing accident. There's a small tick mark just below 14 that will be visible, but only minimally once the board is treated.

Here's a top view of the board, which also shows the headstock.

And since waste is never good, I made the headstock offcut into a phone stand for my desk. So I'll never be far from my baby

Making the dots was an adventure. I wanted them to be of very similar length, to minimize how much I'd have to file them. I wanted a fairly flat top and bottom, to avoid the "pinch-wedge" from using snips. (My snips are only big enough to handle the 1/16" dots anyway.)

This jig is what I came up with. It's really just a slot for a dremel cutoff wheel, and a hole to put the brass rod. It was pretty fast, and as reliable as I hoped. It did eat thru dremel disks though. Curious if anyone has better ideas for this.

It's going to be wet here in NorCal for the next week at least, so I doubt I'll be getting much more done for a while.

 

[bbh]

That many dots would confuse me.

 

[FretsAreFor]

That many dots would confuse me.

I assumed they would confuse me as well. A little experimentation put me at ease though.

Most of the time I'm just looking at the side dots; the top dots are (1) to look awesome, and (2) for double-checking finger position in a pinch.

The latter typically only happens in the upper register, and I've found that the full fret lines were MORE confusing. The viewing angle is very skewed past the 12th fret, and it's unreliable to follow the angled lines across to the high strings to find the marked positions (especially 17/19/21). I think having the dots on top will end up making upper-register playing easier.

This is how the Alain Caron bass is set up, FWIW. And my tape-test validated it for me. It's a leap of faith; I'll let you know how well I land

 

[FretsAreFor]

This post is

The Chocolate Lament

As I mentioned previously, I find the color of untreated bubinga to be, well, nauseating to the point of wretching. Don't @-me.

So I went to some rather extreme lengths to find the perfect dye. I have about 20 different brown-shade dyes, so I went to town.

The color in this photo is poopie, so you can't really tell, but just about every color I put onto bubinga looked incredible. I opted for chocolate, mostly because I liked how it played with the other woods in the build.

So, voila, the chocolate fingerboard!

Fricking gorgeous. The brass dots jump off the board beautifully.

I've done one epoxy board in the past. It was successful but a pain in the butt. So I opted to use CA glue for this one. A few test boards later, after following JIsch's instructions to use thin glue and gloves to spread, and we have a board!

I'm really excited about this. Even without sanding, the glossy chocolate board is speaking to me.

So, here we go! I set up a nice sanding board with 180 and started nice and gentle. Fully-cured CA glue is actually a pleasure to sand; all that mess in the paper blows off super easy.

Alas, my joy was not to last.

This is the dilemma of a dyed board. It really needs a thick treatment of glue. I touched it up and sanded thru again, albeit slightly less. I'll give it one more shot, and if that doesn't work, we'll move on to the big guns (epoxy).

So, while I was dealing with this frustration, I worked on the back cap. I put together the cap last month out of a bookmatched slice of wenge with a bubinga stripe. It's designed to match the back of the neck, which is also wenge with a bubinga stripe.

Yesterday I took the rough-shaped cap and cut out the cavity cover. Really happy with how this turned out. Needs some sanding, but it's exactly what I was going for.

 

[FretsAreFor]

And now....

The body. It is finished.

First, the holes. So many holes. I sacrificed a couple of honorable spade bits to make the holes for the knobs & switches.

It probably just seemed like a lot of holes because the bridge takes 10 of them. Other than that, just the regular: 2 for the pickups, one for the bridge ground wire, truss access, and 7 (!) for the preamp controls.

Then one BIG hole...the finger relief for the tuners. Yes yes, it's an ad-hoc template, I should have made a real one, I know. And I did fix those nasty corners.

The back cap was always meant to be a key feature of this bass. Not least because of the integral cavity cover. But I didn't actually figure out how I wanted to do the glue-up until the last minute.

I didn't want any epoxy squeeze-out where cavity cover interface is. And no slipsliding while I clamped it.

My solution was to hot-glue some registration pins to the body to catch the cuts in the cap where I sliced out the cavity cover. I also added a few guides to the cap itself, so it would pretty much snap into place, and it was prevented from moving where it didn't ought to move. Here's a prep shot.

Gave it a day to cure, then yesterday went out back to hit it with the router. Here's a few premature glamour shots of the finished body. I'm super chuffed!

I'll start sanding it tomorrow. That will let me get going with Tru-oil while I finish working on the neck.

 

[Beej]

uh... err....

 

[FretsAreFor]

A short post on

Bubinga and brass

I made some knobs out of leftover bubinga, with brass indicator dots. Here they are after their first coat of tru-oil.

The indicator dots are one of several upgrades I wanted to make to the knobs after my first build. It bothers me a little every time I have to feel around for the neutral detente on the tone & blend pots.

Also, I decided I really want to avoid using set screws. My other build has them, and I hate them. The wood is just too nice to have a giant 1/8" hole on the side.

So, after some experimentation, I discovered that a small piece of heat-shrink tubing over the shaft of the pot provides enough girth to make for a perfect pressure fit. Sweet!

And...what good are indicator dots on the knobs without something to reference off of?

Luckily I had lots of leftover dots from the fingerboard project!

I'm also a bit proud of my low-tech "storyboard" for ensuring all the reference dots were the same angle and the same distance from the dish. Match the centerline of each pot to the edge of the cardboard, and boom. Not exactly aircraft precision, but it will more than do.

Lastly, I decided that I didn't love the pickup covers I made earlier. Those were made of khaya, and I felt they stood out too much in a sea of dark walnut.

So I made a fresh set out of bubinga. Not only will these match better, but they feel much nicer too, as it's a much denser wood.

This marks the "nearly done" phase. I have a solution to my neck woes that's in flight (pics coming soon), and the body is basically ready for finishing.

Not that anyone wants to see what oil on figured walnut looks like

 

[charlie monroe]

Not that anyone wants to see what oil on figured walnut looks like

That’s funny. Darn funny.

 

[Matt Liebenau]

I don’t know if this helps with future knob making but there’s these. I’ve only seen them recently for 6mm 18 tooth. I haven’t seen any 1/4” bushings for a while.

[Invalid or Expired Link Removed]

 

[FretsAreFor]

Yeah that definitely sounds good! My decision was made literally at the drill press. I had the taps out, the set screws in hand, and thought DEAR LORD WHY??? Next time my knobs will use bushings for sure

 

[Matt Liebenau]

They work great for P bass style knobs. I’ve messed with something more in the range of speed knobs and Strat style and those bushings are a bit big for that. I’ve tried drilling the shaft portion over size and filling it with hot glue and pressing a pot shaft in. That seems to work ok as long as you pay attention to making it plumb just not sure how it will hold up, long term.

Anyway, your build is looking good!

 

[Rôckhewer]

Gorgeous build. Cool name.
Not familiar with the game,
But I'm on board ...
gotta love a good hoard

 

[FretsAreFor]

Here we go!

The neck finale

When we last saw our neck, it was in a sorry state. I had dyed it, then coated it with many layers of CA. The sanding cut thru the CA and went thru the dye.

This was my third attempt. I had previously touched up the dye and re-coated the entire board, only to sand thru again.

In taking stock, I assembled the bass and decided I really didn't like what I saw. The chocolate dye looks downright purple next to the walnut. UGH. Definitely not what I was going for.

(Oh, this includes a preview of the finished walnut. One coat of tru-oil. Don't look, I have better shots of the body coming soon!)

So: I gave up my dream of a dark bubinga board. I sanded back all the way through the dye to the raw wood and gave it a few coats of BLO. This took it from horrid pink to glowing orange. I can live with it.

On a test board, I tried sanding thru BLO. I couldn't. So I was confident that even if I cut thru the CA, the board would still look great.

Well, it went better than I hoped. This time I used a medium CA (instead of thin), and paper towels to spread (instead of gloves). The coating went 100x better than previous attempts. It only took one pass with 800 on the ROS to get it looking incredible. Higher grits coming later.

With that out of the way, there's literally only one thing left: the carve. Here it is after half an hour of work. This is all with a flap disc on an angle grinder, followed by hand sanding.

I have another session or two of hand sanding to knock down some hills and valleys, but this is really satisfying.

There's a dilemma coming soon though. If you recall, the body has a matching back cap (bookmatched wenge with a bubinga stripe). However, the body cap is getting tru-oil, while I had planned to keep the back of the neck unfinished. We'll have to see if the difference in finish will be visually troubling. I hope not, but if it is, I might give the neck a single, light coat of oil, then sand it back. TBD.

After this, there's nothing to do but wire it up. The light at the end of the tunnel is bright...time to put on the sunglasses!

 

[Reedt2000]

Loving your choices of material, layout, and shape!

Sub'd

 

[ctmullins]

Yummmmmmmmmmm

 

[FretsAreFor]

It turns out that

Finished is not finished

Before we discuss finishes, I need to confess that this was never intended to be a bass guitar project. This is a blueberry sorter, natch. I posted progress pics here because there aren't any good blueberry-sorting web sites that I know of. So, thanks for being such good sports!

Upon consultation with my wife, we came to the difficult decision to drop this plan. It turns out that I didn't build a very large cavity for catching sorted berries.

It's a real shame, as this back looks SOOOOO SEXY with finish. I will find a way to use it though!

You can see in the image above one of my regrettable mistakes in this build. The recess for one of the neck bushings intersects the body bevel. So when the bushing is in place, it protrudes just a bit. It's not a problem while playing, it just looks like a mistake. Bad placement from early in the construction process.

Also, the cavity cover is still in flight. It's cut from a very flat-sawn part of wenge, and shows a noticeable warp. I'm waiting until the electronics are all installed before I add a cross-grain rib to hold it flat. Then I'll oil it to match and add the retaining screws.

Here is a full frontal shot, after a complete treatment with Tru-oil. I did 3 saturation coats, then wet-sanded it with 200, 320, 600, 800, a white scotch-brite pad, then a french-polish rubber lubricated with mineral oil. The thing is soft as a morning sunrise.

I framed this picture on a crappy table in harsh light because I'm not ready to do full glamour shots yet. Turns out I skipped class when they taught to FINISH WHEN YOU'RE FINISHED. And I'm not finished. I did a full preliminary setup to test the electronics and overall system integrity, and found that the pickup cavities are about 0.2" too shallow. Damn. Back to the router! I'm not too worried... Tru-oil is easy to touch up if anything goes wrong.

Last pre-glamour shot is of the neck. I polished the wenge up to 800, and I now know what solid silk feels like. It feels like GORGEOUS.

I have a checklist of about 10 minor items before this thing is ready to use. Should be ready for a full setup on the weekend!