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Five String Fretless Violin Bass Build

#42
KramerDon said:
Really nice,I love all the little details like the jack plate.Very smart to use basswood for the scroll side carving! Great carving skills!! The only thing is....did you glue the Stradivarious label inside the F-holes before you glued the top on?
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Thank you. Yes the basswood was an effort to cut down on neck dive, It kind of worked. LOL. Also it's soft and easy to carve. I joked with my client and told him he would have to keep a golf head cover from a big #1 wood on it to keep from dinging it.:D

As far as the label goes my lawyer has advised me not to answer. :hiding:
 
#43
Well enough talk, here's the next batch of pics.

I found this nice piece of reclaimed ebony on e-bay and I used it to make the bridge and tailpiece.

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The first thing I did was square up a piece big enough for the tail piece and this is what it revealed.

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Then I drew out the shape of the tailpiece and cut it out on my band saw.

You can see on the bottom where it looks like a hinge. My original idea was to have it be able to lift up for restringing like a metal tailpiece, but it broke under string tension so I had to redesign it and I ended up gluing two pieces hard together.

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I used a convex and concave sanding block to get the radius, just like radiusing a fretboard.

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Here are both parts of the redesigned tailpiece.

I epoxied a thin piece of metal to contact the ball ends of the strings for grounding and drilled a hole from the end for the grounding wire.

It's held on to the bass with the cap screws you see there which thread into inserts I sunk into the body. The bottom cap screw also holds the strap button.

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I put two maple dowels in and got ready to glue the two pieces together. I wanted to make sure everything lined up correctly so I bolted it to the bass first.

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Tail piece glued together and done.

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Then I went to work on the bridge. I used a Hofner replacement bridge as the model for mine. The saddles are just fret material.

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Since this is a five I made mine a bit bigger.

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I didn't want the bridge to float so I used these tune-o-matic bridge posts.

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Bridge all done. I put three coats of tung oil on it to get that shine.

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That's all for now, it's supper time! I'll try to do some more later.
 
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#46
Well here's another quick set of pics before I hit the sack.

I wanted to revisit the scroll and headstock and get that completed.

I added some maple to the sides where the tuners go to build it out a little and carved the sides of the scroll deeper to get that concave look.

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I added spalted maple laminate to the top that matches the top of the bass.

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I reshaped the heel and rounded it quite a bit and added a mother of pearl "M" for Marino bass. I was trying to figure a way to get my logo on the bass and this is what I came up with. I cut the "M" out myself from a blank.

The piece of wenge that the "M" is in is covering a hole where I drilled into the scroll and hollowed it out in an effort to lighten it and combat neck dive.

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That's all for now. More tomorrow.
 
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#50
JennySuzuki said:
Wow. That's friendship and dedication and craftsmanship right there. And this is looking so amazingly cool!
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Thank you. Yes Tim and I go back to 5th grade so we've been friends a long time. This is only my 3rd completed build although I have 2 more in the works. At this stage I am still learning and trying new things just to see what works. When Tim proposed having a scroll on it I said "I've never done one, lets try it and see if I can". It's nice having a best friend as a client because you get to try things and improve your skills in the process. This bass actually took me a year to finish. By the time I got to the end of it I actually went back and redid a few thing I did at the start just because I had learned how to do them better.
 
#54
One more picture of the tailpiece completed.

Tim is an amateur astronomer so he wanted the big dipper on the bass somewhere and this is what we came up with. I used different sized side marker dots to represent the different magnitude stars in the big dipper. Then we put it on the tailpiece so it is aligned with the star that is the octave marker on the neck which represents the north star Polaris. They line up just like they do in the sky.

The "NS" is for North Star which is what Tim named the bass.

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