Ok so I started a build a couple of weeks ago, which turned out horrendous from the time I cut the template til I threw it in my dads woodpile disgusted. Everything was wrong, so I gave up. After a week or so of sitting at my kitchen table with graphing paper and scouring every corner of the net for info, I've decided to try again, and this time not ruining 3 perfect pieces of birdseye maple and a beautiful buckeye burl in the process. So now begins my second attempt at building mney first bass. Here's the specs:
34" scale, 4 string, 1 1/2 inch nut, neck thru construction, fretless. Spruce body with a pine top stained red cedar, red oak and poplar neck, ebony stained red oak fingerboard (hereby referred to as the slappity plank lol). Truss rod will be a hot rod from stewmac.
Everything will be finished in satin clear, probably polyurethane since my body woods are soft, and the slappity plank will receive a clear epoxy finish. Pickup is a simple, single jazz pickup installed at the mid position. All black hardware (since its what I have).
Oook. I purchased everything from Lowes last night after I spent 3 hours scouring for the straightes, clearest spruce 2x6 I could find, as well as comparing grains and cuts in the oak and poplar 1x3s and picking out the pine topwoods which had the boldest grains. I know that nay sayers will disapprove of my wood choices, but in the end I spent a total of 75 bucks on the wood, a gallon of titebond premium and the red cedar and ebony stains, so I believe its gonna work out good lol.
Now for the good stuff. What mainly made me trash my last attempt was poor designing. I just jumped in head first with paper and pencil and sketched up this design I thought was uber cool. However, once I had my templates cut it all changed. I really didn't like the full size template, but I figured that it may change once I actually cut the wood and rounded it over. I was wrong. The body in relation to the neck was all wrong. The horns were way too wide. It looked like one of those generic cartoon guitars. So I tried to fix it. All I did was make it worse. It wound up looking like a cast off BC Rich design, with bad glue joints everywhere and gaps places where the clamps dug into the wood everywhere. I realized it was over when my 11 year old came into the room and was like "dad, I realize you are building that for me, but you don't really expect me to play that ugly thing do you?". So, I chucked it. Then I sat down and started researching. I bought some graphing paper and began drawing. And after a few days and more than a few trys THIS is what I came up with:
34" scale, 4 string, 1 1/2 inch nut, neck thru construction, fretless. Spruce body with a pine top stained red cedar, red oak and poplar neck, ebony stained red oak fingerboard (hereby referred to as the slappity plank lol). Truss rod will be a hot rod from stewmac.
Everything will be finished in satin clear, probably polyurethane since my body woods are soft, and the slappity plank will receive a clear epoxy finish. Pickup is a simple, single jazz pickup installed at the mid position. All black hardware (since its what I have).
Oook. I purchased everything from Lowes last night after I spent 3 hours scouring for the straightes, clearest spruce 2x6 I could find, as well as comparing grains and cuts in the oak and poplar 1x3s and picking out the pine topwoods which had the boldest grains. I know that nay sayers will disapprove of my wood choices, but in the end I spent a total of 75 bucks on the wood, a gallon of titebond premium and the red cedar and ebony stains, so I believe its gonna work out good lol.
Now for the good stuff. What mainly made me trash my last attempt was poor designing. I just jumped in head first with paper and pencil and sketched up this design I thought was uber cool. However, once I had my templates cut it all changed. I really didn't like the full size template, but I figured that it may change once I actually cut the wood and rounded it over. I was wrong. The body in relation to the neck was all wrong. The horns were way too wide. It looked like one of those generic cartoon guitars. So I tried to fix it. All I did was make it worse. It wound up looking like a cast off BC Rich design, with bad glue joints everywhere and gaps places where the clamps dug into the wood everywhere. I realized it was over when my 11 year old came into the room and was like "dad, I realize you are building that for me, but you don't really expect me to play that ugly thing do you?". So, I chucked it. Then I sat down and started researching. I bought some graphing paper and began drawing. And after a few days and more than a few trys THIS is what I came up with:
and yea a gallon of glue lol. I was gonna get a squeeze bottle of elmers, but my Lowes was sold out of both elmers and tite bond squeeze bottles. The quart bottles were 11 dollars, while the gallon jugs were on sale for 15, so a gallon it was lol. Ill never use it all lol
also the width of my first piece for my fingerboard was supposed to be 3 inches, and it turned out to be 2 1/2, which would throw the whole body/fingerboard dynamic off. So it is now a 3 1/2 inch board 
so I'm torn between these two set ups. Also these are just mock-up pickups, not the final product lol.
