Custom design and build for a young bassist

After having discussed wood thickness issues with a bunch of very helpful and talented people in Build with 1'' body?, I'd like to continue with some history, design and build log of a custom bass.

So this bass is going to be for 12-year old son, who started playing bass a couple of years ago and has already made his way into a couple of bands with success. He plays now on my very old and cheap Jim Harley P-Bass that I got from a friend about 20 years ago. While it works nice right now, I think that it would be fun to build something for him, and maybe even with him.

DISCLAIMER: the build will take some time as many things are happening for us at the moment, but we will get there eventually

 

The first step was the design. I wanted something that looked a spaceship while staying functional and at a reasonable scale for his size (even if he is growing - fast!). I liked the design of the bottom end of the billy bass:


At the same time, I wanted a more traditional front, but not as traditional as the P-bass. The Jaguar bass fits the bill quite nicely.

From there, after quite a few hours of designing, I came up with this:

Quite happy with it, but after some discussion in the aforementioned thread, since the body is going to be quite thin, the need arose to make the heel longer:

 

Now, this is all very nice, but I needed some reality check: the dimensions were not at all correct for the PJ pickup set up I want (the neck pickup is way too close to the neck), the neck scale was off by a couple of inches, and the bridge didn't have the correct dimensions.
So back to the drawing board. Putting everything back in its place created some weirdness with the pickguard, so we reshaped it. At the same time, the longer neck heel, with more frets on the board meant that a deeper cutaway on the lower bout would be quite handy.
Here is the drawing as we worked on it (in inkscape)

And a colorized version

So that's were we are now.
Parts and woods are starting to come in, so I'll talk more about the planned construction in the next post

Feedback is always welcome, and all my designs posted here are licensed under CC-BY-SA, so that anyone is free to use and modify them.

 

Thanks, all good points here! The strap button placement will be in principle on the centerline, I don't think the big horn will be in the way. If it does, I'll put it higher up.

Re the bridge, I recognize the risk, but I think I can wing it... I'll make sure to measure everything three times before committing
Of course, as you say that means possibly loosing the flexibility to change the bridge in the future, but we (my son and I) really like the way it looks.

Thanks! and good point too. I already got a slotted 24-fret board, so it's going to be long though.

 

OK, so I promised some wood, here it comes.

For the body, I have some Ash left from my previous project Jagbass balance
It's a bit thin as we talked about before, so I'm going to put a a flamed Ash top on it. I haven't received the top yet, but here is the back part:


For the neck, my son and I decided on a sandwich design: maple on the outsides, than thin walnut strips around a cherry core:

And as for the fretboard, I received in the mail yesterday: Pau ferro

 

The flamed Ash top actually prompted us to make the pickguard smaller, so as to show more of it. Maybe we will even end up without a pickguard if we find the top to be too beautiful to hide. In which case I will have to go through the back for the electronics.

 

Ok, I got a crazy idea: replace the pickguard with leaving a part as uncolored wood... I can't imagine how difficult this would be to do with stains, but it should look like this:

What do you think?

 

Yes exactly. I never tried a burst before though, any recommendations on what kind of stains to use for that ? the idea would be to use oil on top of it for a mate finish, like this:

 

Oh yeah, I've seen a few BigD videos, good stuff indeed! I'll check out what leather dyes we have here, thanks for the tips!

 

Interesting, how so? I think of it as the propulsion of the space ship