I finished this quite a while ago but I just decided to share it here. More years than I care to remember ago, I found this cool looking Gibson bass pickup on ebay; got it for something like 10 bucks I think. I was going to put in on an old MIJ EB-0 clone. When I got it, I discovered that it was an active pickup which would have been a poor fit. Instead, I decided to build a bass from scratch (well the body at least). Scored another of these pickups, and set to work. Unfortunately, I didn't take anywhere near enough pictures as I went along, but I do have a few to share.
I decided to create a body design somewhat loosely inspired by the RD artist and the Thunderbird. I started with a half-scale design on graph paper which then got transferred to a full-scale drawing on poster-board with 1" grids:
To see how this body would actually work, I then build a full-scale model out of pine as you can see here, this also ended up being a guinea pig for contouring and routing:
Now for the real wood: Curly Walnut and Birdseye Maple:
You'll notice that the pickup has 3 mounting screws in an unique arrangement. I decided that rather than using a big old pickguard (which I was having trouble envisioning) to make my own pickup rings out of wood from some grab-bag bits I scored from Woodcraft. This is an example of the routing jig I made for the inside cuts, sized to match the pickup by using straight bits of wood attached to a masonite frame with mounting tape . I used the technique to create the routing jig for the battery box.
The body is made from Curly Walnut and Birdseye Maple, the neck is a Carvin with an ebony fret board. Tuners and bridge are Gotohs. The pickup rings I crafted from some scraps I got from a local wood store. The inlays on the body are there to a) provide interest, and b) cover up some routing boo-boos.
The whole thing is finished with tru-oil.
For the electronics, I copied the tone control section of the RD-Artist bass, omitting the compression/expansion circuits. The bridge volume control has a push-pull switch to activate the Lead EQ from the RD Artist electronics. Laying this out for perf-board was challenging to say the least:
I decided to create a body design somewhat loosely inspired by the RD artist and the Thunderbird. I started with a half-scale design on graph paper which then got transferred to a full-scale drawing on poster-board with 1" grids:
To see how this body would actually work, I then build a full-scale model out of pine as you can see here, this also ended up being a guinea pig for contouring and routing:
Now for the real wood: Curly Walnut and Birdseye Maple:
You'll notice that the pickup has 3 mounting screws in an unique arrangement. I decided that rather than using a big old pickguard (which I was having trouble envisioning) to make my own pickup rings out of wood from some grab-bag bits I scored from Woodcraft. This is an example of the routing jig I made for the inside cuts, sized to match the pickup by using straight bits of wood attached to a masonite frame with mounting tape . I used the technique to create the routing jig for the battery box.
The body is made from Curly Walnut and Birdseye Maple, the neck is a Carvin with an ebony fret board. Tuners and bridge are Gotohs. The pickup rings I crafted from some scraps I got from a local wood store. The inlays on the body are there to a) provide interest, and b) cover up some routing boo-boos.
The whole thing is finished with tru-oil.
For the electronics, I copied the tone control section of the RD-Artist bass, omitting the compression/expansion circuits. The bridge volume control has a push-pull switch to activate the Lead EQ from the RD Artist electronics. Laying this out for perf-board was challenging to say the least:
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