First off I'd just like to say I'm big fan of this particular forum. Lots of awesome work and inspiration in here. I'm currently just a poor college student makin due with what I can but I'd love to have my own little workshop some day to work on basses.
Anyways.. Here is my first real do-it-yourself bass project. It started out as a blue Squire Affinity that I picked up for cheap because it had a real nice feeling neck to it. Stuck a Quarter Pound pickup in it and it wasn't a bad player. Last summer I decided to strip the blue paint off (I absolutely can't stand blue basses) and see what's underneath. Turned out pretty nice and I just left it as is and moved on.
(I wasn't completely finished sanding in this picture)
Just recently I had an itch to get back into fretless bass so I decided to de-fret it.
I used a combination of ivory piano tops (basically ivory "veneer") and wood filler to fill the slots. I wanted to have some lines visible but not all of them so I went with the ivory on the 1st, 3rd, 5th, etc frets and filled the rest in with filler as you can see. The de-fret was pretty painless and turned out rather nice for my first time I thought.
My goal was to have just the ivory lines showing so I decided to stain the board a dark color to hopefully get rid of the wood filler appearance. I chose a Minwax Ebony stain and applied. I didn't leave it on long and the results weren't too bad. You can still see the wood filler up close and there were a few spots where I filled cracks with superglue that didn't stain.
So that's a mock-up of where I'm currently at. Body is unfinished more or less and the fretboard has been stained once. I do plan to stain the fretboard again to darken it even more and get that real ebony look to it. Now here is where I need some help.
I would like to tie this bass together by finishing the body and possibly the headstock. Right now the headstock, fretboard, and body are all different colors; not sure what type of wood the body is, the fretboard will look ebony like when I'm done with it hopefully, and the headstock is your average maple. I'm pretty limited in terms of equipment and work space so the simpler the better. The only idea I have at the moment is stain the body with the same ebony stain so that the body and fretboard almost match but I'm guessing I would never be able to get them to really match.
Throw me some suggestions! Thanks.
Anyways.. Here is my first real do-it-yourself bass project. It started out as a blue Squire Affinity that I picked up for cheap because it had a real nice feeling neck to it. Stuck a Quarter Pound pickup in it and it wasn't a bad player. Last summer I decided to strip the blue paint off (I absolutely can't stand blue basses) and see what's underneath. Turned out pretty nice and I just left it as is and moved on.
(I wasn't completely finished sanding in this picture)
Just recently I had an itch to get back into fretless bass so I decided to de-fret it.
I used a combination of ivory piano tops (basically ivory "veneer") and wood filler to fill the slots. I wanted to have some lines visible but not all of them so I went with the ivory on the 1st, 3rd, 5th, etc frets and filled the rest in with filler as you can see. The de-fret was pretty painless and turned out rather nice for my first time I thought.
My goal was to have just the ivory lines showing so I decided to stain the board a dark color to hopefully get rid of the wood filler appearance. I chose a Minwax Ebony stain and applied. I didn't leave it on long and the results weren't too bad. You can still see the wood filler up close and there were a few spots where I filled cracks with superglue that didn't stain.
So that's a mock-up of where I'm currently at. Body is unfinished more or less and the fretboard has been stained once. I do plan to stain the fretboard again to darken it even more and get that real ebony look to it. Now here is where I need some help.
I would like to tie this bass together by finishing the body and possibly the headstock. Right now the headstock, fretboard, and body are all different colors; not sure what type of wood the body is, the fretboard will look ebony like when I'm done with it hopefully, and the headstock is your average maple. I'm pretty limited in terms of equipment and work space so the simpler the better. The only idea I have at the moment is stain the body with the same ebony stain so that the body and fretboard almost match but I'm guessing I would never be able to get them to really match.
Throw me some suggestions! Thanks.
