gormsby's Build Thread

[gormsby]

Belatedly taking some advice from the start of the 2024 Summer Build Off, I'm starting a dedicated thread for my builds, which will begin as a continuation of the builds I never finished for that very occasion. So for the first two, which start rather abruptly mid-build, you can find the back stories at Nivå levels up and Red wing's gonna fly.

I'm an amateur builder living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. I build mostly to scratch my own itches, as it were, but have also build a couple replacement necks for a friend who performs locally. I started my first instrument build in April 2023, and after that, there was no stopping. At present, I've finished 7 instruments - 4 basses and 3 guitars - and have three in-process which you'll see here. And now I'm planning fixes and refinements to some of those early builds, so this will be as much a "rebuild" thread as a "build" thread.

But I ramble. On to the builds.

 

[gormsby]

In this post, we catch up on my fretless bass project, code name: Nivå. At the point where I flaked out of the 2024 Summer Build Off (because there was no way I'd get the finish on time to...uh...finish), I had a body core cut and sanded to shape and a neck that had just the main length carved. This body will be a three-wood sandwich, with a thermally-modified northern ash core, thin accent layers of natural northern ash, and black walnut top and back. Here are the inner three of the five layers with just-completed routes for the pickups (which are Nordstrand Zen Blades.)

Fast-forward to gluing on the three-part back:

The bridge I'm using, a Gotoh 404SJ, accommodates both string-through and top-loading, so I included the string-through holes in my design. Stealing a notion from Yamaha's BB line, I decided to drill these at a 45-degree angle to reduce stress on the strings. I even like the look of having the holes "wrap around" to the butt of the body a bit where they land on the edge. First I drilled the angled holes in the core, then when the back was on, finished drilling through the back using the core as my guide. When the top eventually went on, the back and core guided my bit to finish the holes in the front.

Once the holes were done and I figured out how to angle the platform on my Makerspace's drill press, I was ready to drill for the string ferrules:

And with that, we'll pause here to catch up on the other builds running concurrently...

 

[gormsby]

Meanwhile, Red Wing (Rødvingen) also moved along. First, it got its pickup routes. This bass is going to be my homage to the Fender VI, with a similar "Space Age" body shape (though with my own twist), the same switching setup, and Lollar Bass VI pickups. This will also have a chambered "sandwich" body. The core is thermally-modified northern ash, and the top and back will be hackberry, which is one of my favorites -- We'll be seeing more of that shortly. Because of that layered construction, I cut the wiring channels into the core with the router (after this pic was taken) and shielded them before attaching the top -- much easier than the usual oblique hand drilling.

And now for the biggest hiccup, so far, of this project. Though this is an homage to the Fender VI, I am not including a tremolo. The Fender design needs a lot of string behind the bridge to accommodate the tremolo, and as a consequence, pretty much all the string sets for this style of bass are quite long. I want to be able to use Fender VI string sets, so I need a way to "run out" the longer string lengths so that the wraps on the tuning heads stay "on the silk." I am doing this by using a string-through design, and, again stealing a bit from Yamaha's BB line, running those holes at an angle to add that much more length.

So the hiccup was: I hadn't yet learned how to angle the drill press platform at my local Makerspace, so I thought I needed to do this with some sort of one-off jig and a hand drill. Something like this, which I whipped up by drilling straight through a 4x4 block, then slicing the block corner-to-corner:

Great in theory, but in practice, it was a mess. Despite the couple inches of guide this jig offered, my holes through the actual body core came out off by...too much to please the eye.

Eventually, I ended up first, cutting out a rectangular chunk of the core where the string-through holes ran. Then I built up a very large block of the same thermo-ash used in the body. Drilled the string-through holes perpendicular through that large block, then cut new "sides" in the block 45 degrees off of the original sides. After a whole lot of finessing to get the geometry right (so the holes would be in the right place relative to the bridge, once it was attached to the tops 1/4" higher than (and a corresponding hypotenuse forward of) the block in question, I fit that block into the hole I had cut to remove the earlier, botched holes. Resulting in...

Glued the block into the hole, glued the backs to the core, and here we were:

After that, I glued to bookmatched tops on, and did a bit of playing with switch panel design, cut out from pickguard material:

More to come...

 

[gormsby]

And now it's time to introduce Hammerøks. Hammer-axe is the literal translation, but really it was the best way I could shoehorn an "MM" into my Norwegian naming scheme. It's my Music Man homage, you see. Høks, for short, is another Hackberry top and back with thermally-modified ash core build, like Rødvingen just up-thread. I'm introducing it here because it's in this group shot of the "Summer 2024 class":

Hammerøks (Stingray homage), Nivå (fretless) and Rødvingen (Fender VI homage).

And now again, as roundovers!

And on that note, I will pause for things like sleep and food, and continue this catch-up roll-up tomorrow.

 

[gormsby]

Contour carving!​

For Nivå, I wanted to go in a modern, sculpted direction, with some bold cuts for arm and belly, and adding a few others to get some visual impact where the cuts would expose more of the natural ash accent layer. Once the roundovers were done and helped establish a baseline for the carved cuts, I set to work with my trusty shinto rasp. My friends are probably sick of me talking about the amazing shinto rasp. I think I took these at the very end, though I might have done a bit more -- memory is fuzzy. I did take down any edges where the roundover bit went below the plane of the front or back (as you can see in the lower cutaway on the back), to make it a smooth curve.

For the other two, Rødvingen and Hammerøks, I kept more inline with the slab aesthetic of their respective inspirations (the Fender VI and the Sting Ray). Both have an arm contour, but much more subtle. Here's where I landed after all the carving:

A digression on wood​

Though I love my pau ferro fretboards, I generally try to stick to local woods where I can. We have a great lumber source in Minneapolis, Wood from the Hood, who acquire and process a lot of the trees from storm blowdowns, "nuisance" removals, and disease prevention (curse you, Emerald Ash Borer!) From there, I can get northern ash (including "thermally modified"), black walnut, white oak or elm (should I ever want it), and my new favorite, hackberry. I still have to get my hard maple elsewhere, since the local stuff tends to be the softer Silver Maple. But at least it could grow here, right?

So the hackberry. Last spring I started a pair of Telecaster-inspired guitar builds, and went in to Wood from the Hood thinking I'd do a thermally-modified ash core with natural ash top and back for one of them. As I was browsing I came across a stunning hackberry board, sawn in just the right spot to really highlight the alternating light and dark grain. Did a bit of due diligence on my phone and immediately switched my plan -- Hackberry for the top and back. Bookmatched. Here is the Tele build: Just one light coat of Minnwax oil-based "Natural" stain to add a hint of color, a dewaxed shellac seal coat, clear grain fill, and oil-based poly topcoat. It's hard to photograph, but the interplay between the vertical light and dark grain and the horzontal figuring is lovely. I added a thin plastic binding line between the hackberry and the thermally-modified ash to highlight the contrast, but probably didn't need to (and I skipped that on the following basses.)

So when I started the Rødvingen and Hammerøks builds last summer, hackberry was on my mind. When finishing time rolled around (more on that shortly), I struggled a lot with the "ethics" of staining that beautiful hackberry. I was sort of committed to red in some form for the VI (it's the "rød" in the name, after all.) I had done a lot of dye tests with some hackberry test swatches: Amber, various shades of black, green, blue, and red; and red was the most "respectful," I guess I could say, of the underlying grain and figure. Blue, green, and black tended to wash out the figure and grain, while amber...If I wanted amber, I could just use thermally-modified ash instead (and I have a big mulberry slab waiting in the wings for future builds that will hit that amber space.) Still, I felt that dying the hackberry was almost a "crime against wood" of some sort. I decided to do something much less severe with Hammerøks, which had the more dramatic grain in any case, so I could have it both ways, between the two basses.

 

[gormsby]

Meanwhile, over in neck land...​

Photo documentation is scant, but concurrent to the work above, I was also carving the heel and headstock transitions on the necks for all three, and got my logo decals in place. The Å glyph is copied from a sign at the still-so-named "Upper Årnes Farm" in Norway, where my great-grandfather emigrated from in the mid-1800s. Since there's already an Ormsby Guitars established in Australia, I needed a different name should I ever venture into business, and besides, O is a very boring letter to work with, branding wise. All are maple/walnut laminates. The walnut-dominant one will go on Rødvingen:

 

[gormsby]

Adventures in finishing​

I often laugh at the term "finishing." In the timeline of a build, the process of final sanding, staining, sealing, grain filling where desired, and top coating, and allowing each of those to dry or cure appropriately begins well before the half-way point, in my estimation. So calling it "finishing" is essentially teasing us, if not outright mocking us.

I thought I knew the drill. "Test everything: Do the whole finishing schedule, sanding through final topcoat polish, on scrap before touching the workpiece." I believed I was doing it right. I have the test pieces to prove it -- a whole library of them. But let's go back to mid-October...

It started with the sanding. Necks and bodies, all sanded through 220 grit, endgrain on the more open-pored woods with 320. Then I applied my stains and dyes. A bit of Waterlox on the Walnut-dominant Nivå body to pop the figuring was lovely. Red dye on Rødvingen looked great on the hackberry top and back, but on the thermally-modified ash on the sides, it did not look great. Something was just off with red dye over that wood hue. So I ran some black dye around the edges and into the roundovers -- too quick a transition to call a burst; more of a very narrow fade. It looked great. For Hammerøks, I tried a 50% diluted water-based amber dye stain on the hackberry. Unlike my test piece done exactly the same way but taken from a different board, this came out far too orange. The stain uptake must have been much more significant or something. So I ended up sanding that back and decided to let the only color come from the dewaxed shellac seal coats and the oil-based poly, thus:

Relearned Lesson 1: Test your finish schedule on not just the same wood, but also the very same piece of wood that your workpiece came from.

After sanding back and sealing, Hammerøks looked beautiful. I compared my hackberry telecaster look to a coarse-woven linen. Hammerøks, also hackberry but a different board, reminded me, more than anything else, of marble (you can still see a bit of the overbearing "orange" in the deep grain around the bridge area):

So dying and staining were done. Time to do another couple of sealcoats with dewaxed shellac, then grain fill. I had this part down. I've done it on my previous few builds. The shellac would seal the underlying dye/stain layers (one water-soluble, the other oil-based) from any trouble with the water-based Aqua Coat grain filler. I realized my Aqua Coat was almost gone, so ran out and bought another jar. Exactly the same stuff, same label, same size, same spot on the shelf as where I got my first jar. Only one difference: I little red bug on the label noting "Improved formula, now more solids! Fewer coats needed." "Sweet," I thought, but still basically the same stuff -- Water-based over shellac. No problem.

Oh, dear reader. First, Rødvingen. Within a minute of the grain filler hitting the body, the shellac seal coat began to crackle. within the next minute, the red and black dyes were reactivated and pulled into the shellac-grain filler glop. The "new improved formula" apparently dissolved shellac like nothing. So much for my seal coats. The nice red-to-black dyed edge transition became a pink and grey smear. I had a botched dye job underneath an alligator-y, lumpy shellac and grain filler mess. I scraped off as much of the still-wet glop as I could, then set that body aside to dry before attempting further recovery.

I assumed I must have had too thin of a seal coat -- maybe the Aqua Coat got under the sealer somehow and reactivated the dye. At least there's no dye on Hammerøks, so that's not a problem. I told myself. Started grain filling Hammerøks and got much the same thing. Aqua Coat hit the shellac and turned it to goo. Ugh. Scrape off what I can, set aside for later.

I had planned to grain fill the walnut on Nivå as well. Took a look at what I had so far and decided to just let a couple more layers of shellac do whatever pore filling it could and call it good. Walnut grain was tighter than hackberry anyway.

Next day, scraped and sanded everything back until I had a good finishing surface again. I think I did end up with some effective grain filling, albeit with an unholy mix of shellac, Aqua Coat, and dyes. But I got it smooth and (re)finish-ready. I took the opportunity when re-dying the red on Rødvingen to go lighter on the red, let more of the grain show through. So in the end, I got a better finish than the original.

Relearned Lesson 2: Any "improved" or "reformulated" product is a different product, regardless of branding or label. Re-test everything.

After cleanup and resealing, here is where the thee bodies were:

...And we are now all caught up! Poly coats have been added (General Finishes Arm-R-Seal) and are curing until December 6th.

 

[gormsby]

Thoughts on my "house" style​

The builds documented immediately above are my builds #8, 9 and 10. Looking back over the first 10 and already thinking about numbers 11 and 12, I'm starting to articulate some aspects of my design style. Not as a set of rules, necessarily, more as observations. Here's what I've articulated so far. Curious if anyone sees other things going on that I don't.

Distinctive horn curve​

In my earliest drawings for my first build, the first has smoothly curved horns much like any FSO. My second draft bears the scrawled label "Chompier," like the jaws of a shark or something. The outer bit of the curve of both horns has a bit of a crook, a sharpening of the curve, and the tips a bit more sever of a point, which brings to mind words like "aggressive" or "bite" or "chomp." Once I found the shape I liked, I've kept it in pretty much every build, to some degree.

Preference for local woods​

Mentioned in previous posts. I have a good local store; most of my wood comes from the city of Minneapolis. Exotic fingerboards are the outliers.

Preference for rear-routed control cavities and minimal-to-no pickguards​

I've tried designing my own pickguards and front-mounted cavity covers. One worked (my avatar), all the rest were failures. I prefer to highlight the top wood anyway, and pickguards get in the way.

Exposed lam headstocks​

In a few early builds, I experimented with headplates. I think I got pretty good at them. A matched body and headstock can look pretty cool. But somewhere along the way, I realized that the headstock is the only place where the audience gets to see how the neck is comprised. It's a design feature that should be seen. My two builds with headplates that obscure exposed laminate necks are both doomed to provide parts for upcoming "improved" versions.

Angled headstocks, scarf-jointed​

When I built my P/J, my Fender Precision homage ("Løven"), I tried a Fender-style straight headstock. I don't like it. String trees are clutter. Single-piece angled headstock/necks...we all know: Fragile and wasteful. Scarf joints are nothing to be ashamed of and need not be ugly. Leo was trying to shave pennies-per-piece at industrial scale. I'm trying to build beautiful functional instruments. Løven is getting a new neck with an angled headstock. 14 degrees, because that's the jig someone made and left at my local Makerspace.

Zero frets and string spacers​

I'm a programmer professionally. "Separation of concerns" is a programming aesthetic that bleeds into my overall design sense. Nuts try to do too much - set the scale legth, set the string height, set the string spacing. Fiddling with nuts to get string height right is tedious. Let a zero fret deal with string height and scale length with literally zero work after slotting, then your nut AKA "string spacer" has just one job. When I started building, I got a 12" length of 3" x 1/8" brass bar stock at my local Ace Hardware for like $5. giving myself a generous 1/2" for each starting blank, I'll get 24 builds out of that.

Fretlesses, though, get nuts, of course. If it had a zero fret, it wouldn't be fretless now, would it?

A very strong leaning toward offset bodies​

My designs for Fender VI homages follow the original Jaguar-esque offset body shape. My Stingray and Telecaster homages yield to lateral symmetry of their inspirations at the butt end, but break out with offset curves from bout to horn (update: Looking again, I'm reminded that both the Stingray and the Precision do have a subtly offset waist; the Fender Tele appears to have strict symmetry). My Precision homage is subtly offset; my modern bass designs, assertively offset. I tried to build a semi-hollow body guitar in the vein of the Epiphone Dot or ES-335, but I could not bring myself to make it fully symmetrical. I'm taking another run at that design, and despite the additional challenges, it's still going to be assertively offset. That's just...how I lean.

24-fret necks​

Maybe it's the old 16-year-old metal dood shredder in me. Maybe I'm compensating for the lack of symmetry in my offset bodies. But stopping short of a full two-octave fretboard just seems cheap and petty to me. Fender and Gibson do it wrong, Yamaha and Ibanez do it right. All my necks get 24 frets. That has consequences for my body designs: More severe cutaways; It breaks the "Jaguariness" of my Rødvingen VI design. It's a blocker to me ever doing a fully-symmetrical ES-335-style build. No apologies, No regrets.

Natural finishes​

Of ten builds, two have solid color finishes. One of those, which achieved the perfect grain-enhancing gloss black finish I was chasing for a while, will be stripped for parts for an upcoming natural finish build. I just keep falling in love with the wood over the build process. As documented above, I felt kind of bad even about applying transparent red over the hackberry on Rødvingen.

 

[gormsby]

Two of three in the "current batch" are done enough for a full report. Early December was when the cure time listed on the Arm-R-Seal tin arrived, so I started in with the leveling and polishing of three bodies and three necks. I dry sanded starting with a very quick and light pass with 320 then moved from 400 to 2000 with the sandpaper. After that, the MicroMesh stack from 2400 up to 12,000, switching over to wet-sanding when I hit 4000. Then some rubbing with the MicroMesh liquid whose name eludes me at the moment. All that didn't quite get me to a full gloss, but pretty close. The bit of satin sheen is most noticeable on black edges of the Rødvingen body, but elsewhere it doesn't hinder the look of the wood. Rødvingen (my Fender VI-inspired build) and Hammerøks (Sting Ray sort-of) are pretty much built-up, save the cavity covers and some needed tweaks. But below on the polishing table, here are Hammerøks and Nivå Nord, the unfinished third of the set, in the midst of finish sanding.

I had hoped to take advantage of the cure time to get the nuts and string spacers done, but unlike last year, this December had seasonally-appropriate temperatures for Minnesota, and thus I couldn't just run out to the garage to work on stuff -- that garage being unheated. So I wasn't all set to pounce once curing was done. Eventually I finished the two string spacers for my zero-fret outfitted pair, and moved on to building them up.

The next obstacle was my nemesis -- bridge mounting screws. I don't know what it is about bridges. Is it because vendors throw in their cheapest, weakest screws? Is it just because the screws are so long? Is there a key thing I'm missing? Checked all the pilot hole guides telling me "drill an x diameter pilot hole for a y diameter screw in hardwood" and did as instructed, yet for maybe the third time with a recent build, one of the bridge screws just sheared right off when it was almost in. Fortunately, I'm getting good at this:

Pictured: Screw extractor in the drill chuck, block with guide hole, pliers and chisel for post-extraction cleanup.

Got the broken-off screw out, glued in a dowel, and leveled it all off when dry. As luck would have it, the repair was all under the footprint of the bridge, so no touchups needed on the finish.

Spent a long day at the MakerSpace's electronics lab wiring up the electronics, then back home to mount the rest of the hardware, attach necks, and string them up. And here we are...

Hammerøks ("Hammer Axe", or "how can I squeeze an MM reference into a name?)​

• Hackberry top and back
• Body core is thermally-modified ash
• Maple/walnut 5 piece neck
• Pau Ferro fretboard
• Zero fret with brass string spacer
• Gotoh GB707 tuning machines
• Delano MC4 FE/M2 pickup
• Series/Single coil/Parallel switch
• Volume and tone
• Off-brand MM-style bridge

As luck would have it, there's just enough room at the heel to squeeze the truss rod wrench into the channel in the neck without removing the neck. A nice win that I expected to be close.

Turns out that I cut my neck pocket just a bit too deep, so the saddle screws are pretty close to the bottom of their travel. I'm going to cut a shim for the neck and get myself another 1/8" of neck height, which will let me get the bridge screws off the deck. I'll also need slightly longer pickup mounting screws to allow the pickup height to be right after the shimming. I also noted that the bridge plate is lifting a bit on the front edge. I expect this is due to the bridge ground wire underneath it, but may also be a consequence of buying a relative cheapie. It's tightened down pretty well though, so don't expect it to be a performance issue.

And then there's the string alignment. In my drawing, which turned directly into a template, indicated straight string pulls, but I must have misjudged where the strings would hit the tuning machines or something. I'm consoling myself with the fact that Gibson's production models have it far worse.

After a day for the neck to settle in and a rough setup, I'm really happy with this one. Even without the height set just right (waiting for the fine tuning until after I get the neck shimmed), the pickup sounds great. I thought I might have been overengineering with the 3-way switch, and almost went with just parallel and split. But series is a nice difference. If I had to go with a two-way switch, I'd probably keep parallel and series and skip the split. But I don't have to choose, and I'll keep the 3-way.

Up next...Rødvingen!

 

[gormsby]

Rødvingen ("Red wing")​

• Hackberry top and back, dyed translucent red, quick fade on the roundovers to black edges
• Thermally-modifed ash body core
• Walnut/maple 5-piece neck
• Maple fretboard with walnut inlays and binding
• Gotoh SG381 tuning machines (or maybe 360s - too lazy to look right now.)
• Fender Toronado bridge
• Lollar Bass VI pickups
• On/off switches for each pickup, plus a "strangle" switch that cuts the low end pretty dramatically
• Fender's Bass VI string set, 100-24 roundwound

This board was my second run at hand-cut inlays. Not perfect, but much better than my first attempt. Next time I do inlays, I want to try using the laser cutter at my MakerSpace -- I have high hopes for clean work with that.

As mentioned, still need to get to the cavity covers

This was my first build with walnut as the main neck wood, and so far, it's holding up great!

I am quite happy with how this one turned out as well. The Lollar pickup set sounds very good. I think with the 24 fret neck compressing the available space for pickup spread, I'm losing some of the benefit of the three-pickup arrangement, but the center pickup works as the humbucking partner for the neck and bridge pickups when engaged, so it helps that way as well as adding a subtle option. My one big goof on this one was installing the cap on the wrong side of the "strangle" switch, so when it's in the up position, the cap is out of the sequence and the strangle circuit is disengaged. Since the pickups are all on when their switches are up, I'm just reinterpreting this as a "bass boost" switch. If I think of it that way, then up "boosts" the bass (actually, just not cutting it).

 

[gormsby]

Had some extra time at the MakerSpace yesterday. Grabbed a couple bits of wood from the scrap bin, jointed an edge, glued up the shallowest angle jig: 3mm rise over 290mm run (approx 1/8" over 12"). Sliced some thin ash pieces on the bandsaw, then took a magfence, the jig, and the ash slices to the spindle sander. Walked out with about 12 angled neck shims and a few level ones that cost me about an hour of work, maybe $2 for the ash, and nothing for the scrap wood jig.

Got home and shimmed the neck on Hammerøks (see above). Now I can get my string height down to where I wanted it and also added some clearance on the bridge saddles. This is the kind of fix I love -- Not having to pay $big_vendor_in_this_market $12 apiece or whatever for a (granted, somewhat precision cut) wafer of wood.

 

[gormsby]

Nivå Nord (finished but for the cavity cover)​

I have made two previous fretless builds, both of which came out fine and functional, but ended up not feeling like quite what I wanted. This one hits all my goals. I scavenged all the hardware and pickups from one of those previous attempts (the other previous attempt will provide materials for my next build). I used the same body outline as several others of my 4-strings, but experimented with different woods and edge treatments. So here it is:

• Body: Thermally-modified ash core, natural ash accent layers, black walnut top and back. Waterlox base layer, shellac, and General Finishes Arm-R-Seal poly
• Neck: 5-piece maple and walnut
• Fingerboard: Royal Blackwood, 12" radius, white side dots
• Buffalo horn nut
• Gotoh 404-something bridge
• Gotoh 707-something tuning machines
• "Cosmo black" hardware color
• Nordstrand Zen Blades
• Volume/Volume/Tone
• D'Addario Chrome 100s

Some build notes:

• The predecessor of this build was a classic case of over-engineering. I put a John East 3-band EQ onboard. Yet I found myself always opting for the passive bypass. So I found a new home for the East, and this bass skips the whole preamp business.
• I love the royal blackwood!
• The natural ash accent layer had a bit less "show" than I had hoped. For another similar build, I'm going to make those layers 1/4" thick instead of the 1/8" used here.
• Looking at the headstock, I do see a "patch and redrill" for the E-string tuning machine positioning in the near future. Updating my "build process" template document to determine drilling for tuning machines by actual string path measurement, rather than "theoretically correct" plan drawings.

 

[T_Bone_TL]

And then there's the string alignment. In my drawing, which turned directly into a template, indicated straight string pulls, but I must have misjudged where the strings would hit the tuning machines or something.

Needs accurate layout of tuner post diameter and string diameter, so the edge of the string meets the edge of the post (as happens in Real Life.)

Did you possibly draw a smaller post and "upgrade" to a larger post? Lining up the centers of both objects is another common way to get far different than drawn results.

 

[JFlo]

I love the wood combinations!

 

[gormsby]

Did you possibly draw a smaller post and "upgrade" to a larger post? Lining up the centers of both objects is another common way to get far different than drawn results.

I honestly don't know what happened, other than "slop" in my process. I start with a paper printout of the whole thing, actual size. But I just use the post hole diameter on my drawings, not the actual post diameter, and sort of eyeball the positioning relative to the string path, shooting for roughly tangent. When I drill the holes, I lay the headstock drawing on the piece and punch the centerpoints through the paper on to the wood for drill centering. It would be fairly simple for me to doublecheck the string path, measure the actual offset, and drill accordingly, rather than give undue credence to my sloppy paper-based template. Earlier builds did it better, so I think this was a case of "I've done this before, no problem"-style carelessness.

 

[gormsby]

I love the wood combinations!

Thanks! That thermally-modified ash in the center really comes to life under oil-based poly. Raw, it looks like a just-OK amber-brown wood, nothing special. The topcoat transforms it.

 

[gormsby]

Saving a neck​

Last winter I worked on a fretless project that I finished, but was not delighted with the result. I was chasing the "perfect" gloss black finish and when I got there, I was ready to move on to natural wood looks. There were a couple other minor issues that added up to "Meh, I want to try this one again."

The headstock had a plate of ash on the front that I dyed black to match the body, but I had to hack up the truss rod access a bit to get around the added thickness of the plate (thus I've learned that headplate thickness has to come off the front of the headstock.) I had an idea to use a Norwegian 5 Kroner coin as the truss rod access cover -- that coin is minted with a center hole, perfect for passing the screw through. That would hide some of the mess, but I'd need to epoxy on some black pickguard material as a "skirt" for the rest. In the end, I just decided to write the whole thing off. Kind of a shame, because the neck is probably the slimmest I've achieved, has great figure in the maple, and a nicely leveled and playable pau ferro board.

But as luck would have it, re-using my neck template for all my 34" scale basses pays off. There's some minor variation, particularly in how I fit the heel into designs and thus overall length, but in this case, I realized that if I take about 1/8" off the heel end of this neck, it will perfectly fit into the pocket of my recently-completed (fretted) Hammerøks. In other words, If I can save this neck, I'll have a fretless option for that bass.

So here's the plan:

1. Patch up the excessive truss rod access hole as much as possible (done today and pictured, glue drying.)
2. Cut away the black headplate and just a narrow slice of the underlying maple/walnut 5-piece lam underneath. taking the kerf from the natural maple side rather than the black-stained ash should be enough. That kerf would also eat up the remaining messiness in the truss rod access area.
3. Saw off of a slice of a walnut/maple 5-piece scrap left over from another neck (I always make my blanks too long and have lots of short bits around.) If I make this new piece a bit thinner than the old headplate and leverage the extra bit I'll saw off the front, this will let me reduce the overall thickness on top by about 3/32" and still be thick enough for the tuning machines.
4. Take this opportunity to check the tuning post hole alignment and patch and re-drill any that need fixing -- great test bed before I try this on Nivå Nord.
5. Glue that top piece on as the new headplate, recut a cleaner, smaller truss rod access, and refinish.
6. I still have the nut, as well, already perfectly fit and cut (not pictured).

Unfortunately, most of my maple-dominant (with walnut stringers) scraps have a wider maple center and wider stringers, so I won't be able to match the headplate to the rest of the laminate perfectly. So instead of having something that looks just a bit off, I'm using a scrap (from Rødvingen's neck!) that's walnut-dominant, with maple stringers - the reverse pattern of the neck. It will have good "I meant to do that" bona fides and still look great under a natural finish.

 

[gormsby]

Neck rescue update: Old headplate removed, new plate glued on, tuning post holes checked and the one bad one filled with new plugs. Made five plugs, needed one - Four for the parts box.

.

 

[gormsby]

Ooof. I just counted the things I'm currently working on. "Projects" might be overstating it for some, but at the moment I have these, ugh, seven things going on. I'll add a note about new learning opportunities or challenges for each:

1. A baritone-length neck for a friend who likes my work and wants to turn his Squier Bass VI into a baritone. I offered him a bubinga fretboard that I had no plans for, and he was excited about it. Also wanted diamond inlays. Bubinga is hard, y'all! Broke a chisel carving out for the inlays, but they're in, and look not bad. He likes the Fender look, so contra my typical approach, this one's getting a 7ender-style 6-in-line with string trees. Whaddaya do? So I now know how to work with bubinga -- knowledge that I hope to reuse...well, never.
2. My son wants an electric tenor ukulele! How can I deny the kid a chance to make more music? He wants to paint the body on his own, "grafitti style," so I'm delivering a white body, walnut neck with maple stringers, and a pau ferro fretboard that he picked out. After working with basses, this is an exercise in learning how to make things smaller.
3. Løven re-neck: The bass in my avatar pic has my first (and last, for my own projects at least) flat, Fender-style neck (non-angled headstock.) Strings sound a bit weak and I really want an angled headstock to get a better break angle. Plus the water-based poly is not the most flattering to the maple and walnut construction. So building a new neck for it. Taking this opportunity to switch to walnut for the main wood and maple stringers, which is holding up well on my recent Rødvingen build. Maple fretboard, walnut binding and dot inlays, slightly oversized at 3/8" diameter, because all the 1/4" plug cutters at the MakerSpace are too dull and the 3/8" cuts really well.
4. Nivå Jazz: 34-inch-scale, fretless bass with DiMarzio Relentless J pickups. I took a first run at this last winter, when I was chasing the "white whale" of a beautiful grain-highlighting gloss-black-on-ash finish. A few issues with that led me to try again, this time with some New Mexico Mulberry I got from my brother-in-law. In my last batch of basses (read upthread if curious), I made an extra fretless neck using Royal Blackwood (AKA torrefied Purpleheart) with this project in mind. After the low-E tuning machine positioning fiasco of my Nivå Nord build (up-thread), I needed to patch and re-drill the hole for that post. As luck would have it, I still had off-cuts from that headstock, so I could cut a plug of the maple/walnut laminate and get it (almost) in the right position for the patch. Pic below.
5. A semihollow guitar (I believe here we call them "Piccolo 6-string basses tuned E-to-e"), also using some of the Mulberry (each slab is about 2" by 2' by 4', and I have two of them-- lots of wood.)
6. A "redo" of my first build, another Fender VI-inspired 6-string. Unlike Rødvingen which tried to stay closer to the Fender template as far as string spacing, this one, "Vingen 2", will have 16mm spacing for easier fingerstyle playing. I looked at the original Vingen and realized I could do better with the neck, the body, and the electronics. So, just redoing the whole thing. I'll be re-using my Lace Bass Bars from the original Vingen, but this time I'll be paying close attention to routing approaches. I believe @mapleglo got some of these in place with less than the typical rectangular routing?
7. A neck "rescue", already mentioned here in the posts immediately above. The fretless neck originally made for the first iteration of Nivå Jazz is being reworked as an alternate neck for Hammerøks (also up-thread). Part of this involves fixing the mis-positioned E-string tuning machine.

All of these involve a neck, either previously built or new, and this time I'm being more careful about tuning machine placement after botching a couple previously. I spent pretty much of today mocking up string paths to mark placement and centers for drilling. Below is one point in that process, showing the patched headstock for Nivå Jazz. The divot on the crosshairs just off-center in the circle of the patched hole is the center point for the "improved" position.

 

[gormsby]

A few projects in the works, but none taking shape enough to show off yet. But...the other day I was at my Makerspace, and a guy stopped in asking about donating wood that he was clearing out. He gave me a nice chunk of olivewood, and I took a look at it and saw great fretboard potential. Sawed, planed, and sanded it up today. Got 3 bass-size boards and 3 guitar-sized. Gave a couple away to another luthier who uses the space, and here's what I'm left with.

Do I have any idea yet what I would build with these? Not yet.