Cliff Bordwell (CB) Dola 5 in the works - COMPLETED!

Hello, my name is Mike, and I'm a custom bass addict...

I've had several basses built for me in the past, and though it's been a few years since I last worked with a builder (Alan Cringean of ACG) to commission a bass, somehow I always find myself returning to the thrill of envisioning a special instrument down to the last detail, then watching it come to life at the hands of an amazing artist and craftsman.

Now I get to watch it starting again...

For a while now I've been admiring the work of Cliff Bordwell. My friend @spade2you owns several, and I marveled at their beauty, craftsmanship, and playability. Cliff's Dola shape struck me as an elegant and unique singlecut design, and the more pictures I saw of it from different angles, the more I admired their sculpted contours:



Finally, a piece of wood showed up on the Wood page of Cliff's website:



It's not over-the-top wild grain, but I really liked the dark and light contrast and the subtle flame. Plus I've always been a sucker for the color of myrtle, and I hadn't really seen much spalted myrtle.

From there, it came down to working out the rest of the details:

Makore body -- mahogany is my favorite body wood for the color and the midrange tone, but I wanted something a little different. Makore is supposed to sound similar, but a little more even, and is a little more fine-grained in appearance. Also, Michael Tobias likes to use it for many of his basses, and he can do no wrong!

3-piece Maple neck -- I've had lots of multilaminate necks, but I kind of wanted more of a simple look and more neutral tonal platform than I usually hear with woods like wenge.

Macassar Ebony fretboard -- I love the sooth feel and brightness of ebony, and the grain of the striped Macassar variety is more interesting than plain black.

Matching front and back ebony facings on the headstock -- a nod to the elegant look of high-end acoustic and archtop guitars, especially combined with the plain maple neck.

For neck dimensions, I stuck with a 34" scale. I can play a 35" neck without much difficulty, but I tend to use 4-finger fretting a lot, and it's just a touch more comfortable on 34".

I also requested the wide 20mm bridge spacing that I've become accustomed to on my Curbows. It may feel wide to some people, but it felt like home to me from the first time I played it. Along the same lines, I got up the nerve to request an extra-wide 2-3/16" neck at the nut.

The neck dimensions should give me a wide, flat classical guitar-type feel, combined with being fairly thin front-to-back. I've never really cared for a lot of taper on my bass necks, and I really liked the first wide Curbow 5 and the old Warmoth Wide 5's I had with that width, but it's rather wider than most people like. Just to be sure, though, I snagged an old Warmoth Wide 5 that I ran across on Reverb, to be sure I still liked it as much as I remembered!

It took a lot of going back and forth, but we ended up with these options for pickups and electroics:

2 Nordstrand Bigman pickups with series/parallel/outer swithching -- My initial though was to go with Nordstrand Neo Blade dual coils, because I liked all the samples I'd heard, and getting pickups to fit the extra-wide spacing seemed like it might be a challenge. The tone seemed like it might be too close to the sound of the quad-coil Barts on my Curbow, though, and I really wanted something a little different.

After hearing several people (including Cliff) who really liked the Nordstrand Bigman, I decided to go big all the way and get a pair of Bigman pickups, custom wound to fit the 20mm spacing. (Big Neck! Big Pickups! Big Sound!) They will give me a lot of tonal options that I don't get with the Barts on the Curbow, and the placement will put me more in the tonal range of one of my other favorites, Wal.

Nordstrand 3-band with passive tone -- I'm used to 3 bands of EQ, don't like stacked knobs, and have grown to appreciate the value of a passive tone. The Nordstrand also has an adjustable gain, the help match output with my other basses.

It's not a "build" pic yet, but the first shot of the top laid out for this group of builds was posted this week:



Now the wait begins in earnest!

 

The burl top on yours is very striking, too!

It is pretty exciting, but I've been trying not to think about it too much until the build actually started.

 

The Omaha guys were just talking about that on FB...

 

Different luthiers have different approaches to scheduling their builds. Some seem to have a lot of different instruments in different stages of progress at all times, which can make it difficult to keep track of how things are going with yours.

Cliff builds in batches of four or five basses at a time, apparently maximizing efficiency by doing the same step for several instruments in a row. That means that once your build actually starts, things seem to move along rather quickly!

I saw today on Cliff's page (thenews4) the necks have been started and the headstocks have been roughly cut out. It's also cool to see the headstock overlays all lined up! The black-and-white ebony for another build is very striking, and I'm quite pleased to see the amount of grain in the Macassar ebony that Cliff selected for my headstock (2nd from the right). It should make a neat complement to the spalted myrtle top:

 

Just an ongoing conversation in the Messages/Chat

 

So exciting to see the headstock outline with tuner holes! There will be a matching ebony plate on the back...

 

Just got a fretboard picture from this batch. Cliff has quite the range of contrasting boards in this batch! Mine's on the far end...

 

Now I just have to play the game of figuring out which of the other fretboards goes with which other bass in this batch...

The maple is for @mflatau 's custom shape with the cottonwood top.

Black ebony for the "modified Pink Panther" with the black and white ebony top, and the pink ivory wood for the black limbs-topped Dola, or the reverse?

 

We have a photo of body blanks on Instagram, as well! I believe the second from the bottom is my Makore blank, but I'm not positive I can distinguish unfinished Makore from mahogany or Spanish cedar, and aside from @mflatau 's swamp ash, I don't know what the cores of the other two basses in this batch are:

 

And there is a shot of the body profile cut--nice!

 

First shot of the ebony overlay being installed on the back of the headstock...