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Build thread: walnut, maple, buckeye burl, pickups, bridge

If I ever get to a "more than a couple a year" sort of volume for these things, I want to do some proper wire harnesses, and epoxy pot the preamp pcb. Set up a permanent jig to hold the components in alignment while the wiring is all soldered as a complete unit except for connecting the jack and pickups, and then dropped in.

Or just skip all that and make a pcb that's the size of the whole cavity so the pots can be direct soldered instead of ptp with wires. But that's a long ways off, and in the meantime I've been way too prototype-oriented making little changes between every bass. Which is good because they're always improving, but bad because it's not efficient. A "standard" eq setup could mean that I could drop a completed unit into any of my basses and be all set, which would be very nice.
 
I was checking out @Passinwind 's LPF board thread. If I do a preamp in the next build, I really wanted to do the LPF/Wal style. But I was having a little trouble following. I can solder and follow directions, but that stuff is above my pay grade.

Did you look at the build Wiki? Pretty much everything is on one or two pages for each preamp, no need to wade through all the many twists and turns the long thread has taken over the last 4 1/2 years. But it'll never be an instant gratification kind of thing, because as they say: some assembly required. ;)

Back OT: great looking build @dwizum !
 
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Did you order that board and solder in all the components ?

Yes, I borrowed the circuit schematic from an image I found online, did the PCB layout, had the PCB made (anyone who has used oshpark.com will recognize this as one of their "perfect purple PCBs"), chose and ordered the components (mouser and Arrow), put it together, tried it out, changed a bunch of parts, tried it out, changed more things, and so on. It sounds like a lot of work but it's fun, and it's rewarding in the sense of giving me control over yet another aspect of the design. And if you're willing to write off your own time, it's dirt cheap. Between this and the other handful of preamp designs I've build and used in basses, I'm probably averaging $8-10 in material costs per unit. Compare that to, say, $100 - $200 for a name brand preamp!
 
I want to do a bass with clear covers and/or a clear pickguard some time. Or a gently frosted piece at least. IME if you have the right electronics design, you don't always need a shielded cover.. My Air Jazz bass from one of the buildoffs a few years ago doesn't have a lick of shielding in any of the cavities and it's dead quiet. A good preamp helps, and shielded pickup cables.
 
The saddle height grub screws were a hair loose in the tapped holes and I didn't want them to vibrate out of position, so I put a tiny drop of blue loctite on the bottom of each, then ran them in and out of the holes a couple times.

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Then the bridge went on!

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I got the tuners on this morning as well, but no photos of them. I have gotten the sense while working on this bass that it was going to come out fairly light, at least compared to the original I made for myself - which is a tolerable but heavy 9 pounds 12 ounces, thanks to the ovangkol neck and bubinga body. This one is a featherweight 6 pounds 10 ounces as is (without strings or strap buttons), so I'm assuming it should finish out under 7 pounds. I'm pretty happy with that, light enough to be very comfy but not so light that it feels lacking in substance. Lightweight domestic hardwoods for the win! The two basses balance at about the same angle when held from the upper horn so this one should hang as well as the original does.
 
I'm thinking close to maybe a half pound saved between tuners, wood knobs and maybe the bridge being a smidge lighter?
Did you chamber the body, or is the burl top much lighter than a typical hardwood top of the same thickness?
 
Wow, 7 lb - that's amazing!

I'm thinking close to maybe a half pound saved between tuners, wood knobs and maybe the bridge being a smidge lighter?
Did you chamber the body, or is the burl top much lighter than a typical hardwood top of the same thickness?

Wood knobs maybe a couple ounces saved. Tuners a couple ounces. The neck is fairly slim and maple is less dense than a lot of other neck woods (much less than ovangkol, at least). The walnut body is not chambered (other than the huge control cavity) but it's pretty light, and this is a pretty compact body shape - probably smaller in real life than it looks in photos. Plus it's only 1 3/8" thick in the body. With my other bass, I really think it's mostly the bubinga and ovangkol, plus it has one of those old school multi piece warwick bridges in solid brass, so it's a very heavy bridge.

The burl itself was probably extremely light, but it's soaked in epoxy so it's definitely not light any more!

I'm fairly interested in what you actually have into it (not counting your time, but a total of hours would also be interesting too) vs what you'll list it for. I know, that's asking for a magician to reveal his tricks.

If I knew the exact answers to those questions I would definitely share them. I don't though and it might be hard to guess, especially for something like this where it's a smidge of this piece of wood and a bit of that piece of brass and the neck blank is basically glued up leftover strips from a guitar I built last year, and so on. And an hour or so a couple times a week in the early morning, plus an occasional few hours on a weekend, stretched over two months. Going from raw wood (versus prepared Luthier Wood) and making my own hardware and electronics definitely reduces materials cost - this is probably about the cheapest way to build a bass like this. But there's a huge trade off in time.

I would think of it this way. It takes 5 minutes to order a $200 set of Bartolinis or Delanos or whatever. Job done. You have pickups to put in your bass. You know they're going to sound great, and people will recognize the brand name. No drama. It helps to know what sound you're after but it's pretty hard to go way off the rails doing this.

Or you can learn to make guitar pickups, build a couple iterations of a pickup winder, decide you also want to make bass pickups, then unlearn half the things you thought you knew from making guitar pickups since it turns out it's crap and people building bass pickups are more focused on the truth than tradition. Now, spend all your free time casually browsing the internet trying to find suppliers selling things appropriate for making bass pickups (hint: there aren't many out there, 99% of pickup making is aimed at copying famous designs). Then, re-learn CAD after not touching it for 20 years so you can send your designs off to get laser cut flatwork since you're interested in building something besides another P or J pickup. Next, build enough different bass pickup designs that you get a rudimentary understanding of how tone actually works in a bass. Finally, narrow in on a specific design that you like the best for this particular bass, and build at least half a dozen iterations of it so you can fine tune things. I do sell a few pickups here and there, and use them in my own instruments, but the bulk of the time I spend winding coils and assembling pickups is spent developing, not making a complete product. I would bet hard money that at least 3/4ths of the coils I've wound have ended up in the trash, in the name of constant improvement.

Phew. Catch your breath.

All that, to get to the point where instead of spending 5 minutes ordering a $200 set of pickups, you can spend two or three hours turning $15 of materials into your own pickups! There is no way in heck that makes even any sort of remote sense from a financial standpoint. The good news (for me at least) is that it's way more fun!
 
This is very helpful info. I'm looking at using a lot of maple in the next one and was wondering how I could pull off a 7 lb max. Sounds like a thinner, more compact body, plus chambering might actually be a little too much and cause balance issues.

Yes, it's definitely a balancing act (no pun intended). This is the third of this design I've built so I've been able to see how it works with different combinations of choices. Light body wood helps of course, but you can compensate with a thinner body and chambering. Then if you use a heavy-ish bridge, you're concentrating the weight in the body at the very tail end, where it's most helpful for balance. The result is a body that's lighter, but still balances well. Light weight tuners and a thin neck and you're good to go!

I just got a super nice and super thick slab of gently curly maple that I'm planning on making into some bodies in the future, they'll follow this same recipe and I think it'll work fine.
 
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For reference I just held this body template up to my son's Jazz bass. It's maybe 10-15% smaller overall. And at 1 3/8" it's about 22% thinner than the 1 3/4" Jazz bass body. So, say a 30%-ish overall reduction in size. Plus the cavity on my design is definitely bigger than the puny route under the Jazz control plate. So the body is probably, overall, 35%-40% less wood.