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build thread - 4 string right handed Thumfinizenvette clone

#21
Well I bit the bullet (chickened out?) and went with black hipshot hardware. I got a brass A bridge and Licensed ultralite tuners.

The bass has gotten several more coats of finish this week. In the meantime, I'm shifting gears a bit and building a new pickup winder before I wind the pickups for this bass. The winder I've been using is okay but not fun to use. I'm detailing the new winder over in the pickup building thread:

Magnets & Copper Wire: A Pickup Building Thread
 
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#22
I'm emerging from the pickup making rabbit hole to put this thing together today. I love assembly day! So much anticipation....

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#24
John_Nicholas said:
Hipshot Hardware is really great. I think you will be very happy with it.

Really looking forward to seeing this assembled! So far it looks fabulous!
Click to expand...

Thank you for the kind words!

I have a bit of a love/hate/but-mostly-love relationship with Hipshot hardware. I like the fact that they're somewhat local to me. I like their customer service and overall corporate attitude towards actually supporting musicians and builders, and doing things like making custom hardware or adjusting their standard designs on a request basis. For the most part I think their hardware designs are excellent in terms of function. But I've had a couple annoying issues with their stuff over the years. The matte black finish looks awesome but it picks up fingerprints more easily than I feel it should, and it sometimes seems to get nicks or dings easily. But I like the way it looks much better than the glossy black common on other brands. I've got a 6 string bridge from them on one of my personal basses and I had to file out the string hole in the back of the bridge to make it big enough for a B string to pass through. It was a trivial job so on the one hand I can't really complain, but when you're spending $120 or whatever on a bridge that's supposed to be designed for a B string, it should fit!

I don't want to sound negative though, because I feel like I'm complaining from a position of privilege in a sense. In general I really just feel like I'm not 100% happy with any brand of bass hardware. For most brands I feel that the designs are ultra boringly traditional and not really as aesthetically pleasing as they could be if you're trying to design something that doesn't look like a Fender. I wish one of the major hardware brands would hire a talented graphic designer to help them make stuff look good. But I realize that I'm probably in the minority, since most people seem generally OK with the look of available bass hardware.

Ultimately I'd love to make my own bridges at least (probably not tuners), but I don't have any serious metal working capability nor the space/time/money to add it to my shop, so I just go with the flow. I do think that my next bass will probably revert back to a wood acoustic-style bridge, since I can make those myself and I've been very happy with the ones I've done so far. Maybe I will do a fretless semi-hollow version of this body style.
 
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#25
Nice bass dude. Man, you have summed up the hardware issue for me very nicely. Hipshot is great stuff, and the biggest issue for me in recent years has been exchange rates, which make them cost prohibitive for online ordering up here. One of my regular Canadian suppliers has started stocking them though, which has made a big difference in affordability and so I've been ordering Hipshot again.

I agree with the assessment of their powdercoating finish, it's not as solid as say the powdercoating on my trailer hitch! I like their tuners, but they appear more industrial than the gotohs I also regularly use, so I've been sticking with the Gotohs.

I totally agree about bridge designs. There are a handful that I think come close to the mark of what I want in a gestalt, but nothing that hits it exactly. I've drawn a LOT of bridge designs in the last couple of years and am planning to make some once I've settled on which mill I'll get. :D I missed a small portable mill that a guy was selling that he'd had on his sailboat for a decade. It was perfect for small items, and I should have just paid full price. My offer was ignored and he sold it quickly. :( One of these days... :)
 
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#26
If you ever get a mill we can collaborate!

I got the bass put together mechanically and got the electronics to a point where I could test things, and then I realized that I'd put one of the pickup mounting screws right through the pickup lead. That was right before lunch time, and it was frustrating enough that I put it down and stepped away.

(Don't tell anyone, but I've been playing guitar since...)

(And by guitar, I mean short scale tenor six string bass, of course.)
 
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#29
Hey Dwizum,

It’s coming along beautifully!
I agree with you and everyone else here that your top is outstanding!

Regarding what you and Beej were saying about bridges made me recall similar thoughts and start dreaming again about making my own. I have a black Hipshot Kickass 5 string bridge which we all know where that design originated, but they are a bit too weighty in my book. I reached out to Hipshot via email asking if they would make a lighter aluminum base plate and they suggested getting a B or A style instead :)

Anyway, life goes on - thankfully.

Mind my asking what finish you’re applying? :)
 
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#30
@chinjazz the finish is minwax oil based wipe on satin poly. I've used it on my last 20 or so instruments and I really like it. Despite the "satin" name it does get a little glossy after several coats. I typically buff the finish after with paste wax, at least the neck. It helps give it a nice warm glow and a very fast feel. I don't grain fill and I keep the total number of coats fairly low to keep more of a "polished natural wood" look and feel rather than a glass smooth perfect plastic feel.

The few photos I've shown so far have had a lot of glare on the finish which doesn't show it off well. Once I get this thing buttoned up I'll get better photos!
 
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#31
dwizum said:
@chinjazz the finish is minwax oil based wipe on satin poly. I've used it on my last 20 or so instruments and I really like it. Despite the "satin" name it does get a little glossy after several coats. I typically buff the finish after with paste wax, at least the neck. It helps give it a nice warm glow and a very fast feel. I don't grain fill and I keep the total number of coats fairly low to keep more of a "polished natural wood" look and feel rather than a glass smooth perfect plastic feel.

The few photos I've shown so far have had a lot of glare on the finish which doesn't show it off well. Once I get this thing buttoned up I'll get better photos!
Click to expand...

Awesome! I like Minwax wipe on poly (satin)! It might have been you that turned me onto it here on LC :)
It's nice when you have a maple board so you can cover the entire bass with that finish. At the moment that's at the top of my "go to" of hand finishes. My next bass, I'm going to experiment with Osmo Polyx (inspired by @rudy444 from his last short scale build).
 
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#32
Yeah I love the minwax product. It's predictable and easy to apply, it builds faster and cures faster than typical oil finishes, good durability, and it looks great with no real fuss.
 
#33
I fixed the damaged wire and made some small tweaks. It's pretty much done except for strap buttons, I'm waiting on more felt washers before I put them on.

I glossed over the electronics a bit. The preamp I put in this is a derivative of the FET 2B design that @Ripthorn did, which I had in the original buildoff bass for a while. I eliminated the bright switch and changed some of the part values on the eq circuit, and switched it to a lower value volume pot. I also put a 2M resistor in between the tone controls and the volume pot to cut the overall output. Without those changes. this is a very very powerful preamp And these pickups are powerful too. Definitely needed some taming.

The final change I made was to add a 100k trimpot with a .047 uF capacitor as a passive "tone trim" on the preamp's input. I left it tucked inside the control cavity. The idea is that you can tweak that to set the baseline tone, then use the active tone controls as usual to adjust on the fly. One of the problems I had with the original design (and, indeed, pretty much every active preamp I've ever tried) is that I find the treble control to be nearly useless above about halfway, it's just way way too much treble. With this passive trim pot on the inside, I can dial it down a little and effectively "re-center" the treble control, so the ENTIRE range of the active pot (on the outside of the bass) is actually useful. I have to credit this idea to Carey Nordstrand, I saw a video of him discussing one of their preamps where he explained how he likes to have a passive tone control on his active EQ-equipped basses. At first I thought, "well that's stupid!" but now I feel like it's one of the best ideas I've tried in a long time, in terms of control layouts.

I took some good photos earlier, I'll post them once I get a chance to pick through them...
 
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#39
I'd love to give you an insightful answer to how it plays, but... I'm left handed, so the best I can do is muddle around a bit, and tell you what I know based on my lefty version which is the same body shape and neck profile, for the most part. :D It plays awesome! The nut is 1.5" wide and it tapers out to a 3/4" spaced bridge, so width-wide it's essentially a jazz bass - but the neck is a hair slimmer in profile than a typical Jazz, almost like a typical slim modern Ibanez, so it's pretty fast and comfortable, yet not rrrreally tiny.

Tone wise - It's flexible to the point of being hard to describe. I've got it set up with the internal trim pot a little above halfway down. With the onboard EQ dead flat, the neck pickup is just huuuge and thick. Almost like a P bass and a typical humbucker had a baby. The bridge is very middy and peaky, almost sounds like an MM. Or a typical humbucker with it's coils wired parallel. It's got a ton of punch.

You can tweak the internal trim for more treble and they get a little brighter and have a very "wide spectrum" modern tone. Or roll it back a little more and they get a very warm, woolly vintage tone.

A lot of people talk about "balanced" pickup sets as being desirable. In general I agree with that, but I've played plenty of basses where the pickups were so similar it seemed redundant. I purposefully wanted these to be distinct, at the expense of a little bit of "balance," with the neck pickup pretty bassy and thick and the bridge pretty middy (more so than a typical neck-bridge pair) to provide more contrast in the tone between the two. And of course if you want, you can "balance" them by tweaking the eq. I'm happy with the result, I feel like both pickups are very useful but they're also extremely different.
 
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