gormsby's Build Thread

[EliasA]

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.

Build a six-string. I see the vision

 

[gormsby]

It's been a while. Lots of building and finishing the past few months, and time for a roll-up of it all. First up: An electric tenor ukulele for my son:

• 17" scale
• Walnut neck with maple stringers
• Pau ferro fretboard
• Gotoh guitar tuners
• Hackberry body. I cut the tops separate to do the bookmatching, then glued up and chambered a two-piece main body before gluing on the tops.
• Humbucker pickup (a cheapie, sounds fine), bridge, and knobs from CBGitty
• Volume and tone, with a pull-to-split on the tone knob
• Bone nut
• Melamine lacquer finish on the body (clued in by a video by Tornelli Guitars)
• Oil-based polyurethane finish on face of headstock
• Osmo Polyx gloss on the neck and back of headstock

Consulted with kiddo a lot on this one. His first request was that I reverse the slope on my usual headstock, but he still wanted the logo. "Respect your parents, but find your own identity" -- I dig it. We looked at a bunch of different body shapes and he really gravitated toward the Squier Supersonic design we found on Electric Herald. I did the one-sided semi-hollow thing with one of my earlier guitar builds and he really wanted that, so made it a half-semi-hollow ("quarterhollow"?) Had to epoxy in a restoration where I carelessly forgot about the previously-cut jack hole when routing the roundover.

This instrument is in tough competition -- Kiddo plays bari and alto saxophones in school band, tin whistle and drums now and then, and is picking up keyboards. Lots of composition using online tools as well. But every now and then, I hear the uke.

 

[gormsby]

Nivå Jazz Reincarnated​

This is a "rebuild" of a Fender Jazz configuration I made earlier with a gloss black finish on an ash body. I had completed that one just as I was becoming a fan of natural wood finishes and was tired of the black almost as soon as it was done. At about the same time, the big mulberry slab (more on that below) arrived on my doorstep. Needed something to do with the mulberry, and so when I made my walnut-topped "Nivå Nord" a while ago, I built two identical necks with this in mind. I used the same body template, but reversed the general color layering. Where the walnut one had walnut top and back, a white ash accent layer, and a thermally-modifed ash body core (thus a dark-light-medium-light-dark sandwich), for this I used mulberry (a "medium" hue) for the showing faces, walnut for the accent layer, and white ash for the core (thus medium-dark-light-dark-medium.)

The mulberry arrived at my house as a roughly X-shaped slab, 3' x 2' and about 2-1/2" thick. It came from my brother-in-law's rural New Mexico property, along the Pecos River. The huge tree had died quite a few years ago. It had since aged outside for some time, was brought indoors for a year or two, cut into slabs and stickered and dried for another year, then delivered to me. When they cut the slabs, they measured around 10-12% with a moisture meter, and I measured about 8% before I started cutting earlier this year. The slab had a fair amount of cracks and checking, but I managed to get good pieces for two sets of bookmatched tops and backs, so one went to this project, the other to a guitar. Two of the four bookmatched pairs had fairly narrow, straight grain, while the other two where a bit more wide-grained and dramatic. So this bass featured the former on top, and the guitar the latter (with the alternate patterns providing the backs on each.)

Other than the material, nothing particularly new or noteworthy for me with this build -- I'm getting into the zone where I have some "tried and true" approaches. With the layered body, I was able to do some chambering on the core (white ash) to reduce some weight. Taking more care this time with tuning machine placement, I got nice straight string paths. And tweaking my faceting method during neck carving gave me a bit thinner of a neck profile, which I also like (I've always been a fan of Ibanez SR necks, and definitly prefer Jazz to P in the Fender space.) I stripped the old black version for parts.

The top wood has a figure that in combination with the grain, almost looks like "digital static" in places -- a cool effect. The back has the wider grain, but also needed some spot epoxy work to fill in some cracks. There's still a bit of polishing compound stuck in some pits that I need to get out.

Specs​

• 34-inch scale
• Maple neck with walnut stringers in a 5-piece neck, bolt-on
• Royal Blackwood fretless fingerboard, 12-inch radius
• Buffalo horn nut
• Body is white ash core (chambered) with walnut accent layers and mulberry top and back
• 2-octave neck (i.e. 24-fret if it had them)
• Dimarzio Relentless J pickups
• VVT controls
• Rear-routed control cavity
• Gotoh 404-SJ bridge
• Gotoh GB707 tuning machines
• D'Addario Chrome XL 45-100 flatwound set
• General Finishes Oil-based Poly on body and face of headstock
• Osmo PolyX gloss on neck and rear of headstock

 

[gormsby]

New neck, improved body carve, and new finish for my second-ever build​

The bass currently shown as my avatar pic was the second one I ever built (or maybe the third -- I did numbers 2 and 3 in tandem.) It's a PJ configuration, and I did a Fender-style straight neck originally. After some time with it, I decided I really wanted the angled headstock, and thought I could get a thinner carve on the neck overall. I also wanted to increase the depth of the roundover along the edge of the arm cut on the body. When building, I had done the full roundover first, then carved the arm cut, and finished it by just softening the edge of the arm cut a bit with a shinto rasp.

So, under the proverbial knife went this bass, named "Løven" or "The Lion" (as in "Leo.")

The new neck is predominantly walnut, with maple stringers, reversing the original maple-with-walnut stringers neck. I had some nice figured maple that I used for the fretboard, and did slightly oversized walnut dots for the inlays - my Makerspace had a good plug cutter and forstner bit pair at 5/16", but nothing good at 1/4", so 5/16" it is.

After re-routing the edge along the arm cut, I kept going on the improvements: First, by deepening the lower fret-access cutaway to make it a bit less angular, more curved, and second, taking a bit off the lower bout around the output jack to accentuate the triangular lines of the control cavity cover.

I had been thinking I would restore the same finish as it had before -- a slightly darker deep grain in the northern ash, then grain fill and a light amber stain over the whole thing before polyurethane. But once I got the new neck in place, the whole thing looked a bit...boring. A whole lot of light wood with just the walnut headstock adding some contrast. So I revisited that choice. I've been planning a build for a friend who wants a metalic blue finish on the body of his eventual Firebird-inspired design, so I wanted to experiment with a solid metallic finish -- something I hadn't done yet. I decided to try it out on this bass. I ended up quite happy with my results with rattle-can metallic black topped with rattle-can lacquer. After letting the topcoat cure for a month, I wet sanded with 800 through 2000 grits and polished with Meguiars Ultimate compound. Aside from the fretwork, all the original hardware were re-used from the first build along with the body. Once I was happy with the black body, I cut a new cavity cover. The original was plain black material, but I had some black-white-black material on hand and wanted that contrasting line.

Specs​

• 2-piece northern ash body, finished with Montana Metallic Effect Black spray acrylic under Montana Varnish acrylic-nitrocellulose gloss
• Walnut and maple neck finished with General Finishes Arm-R-Seal
• 24 frets, bolt-on with ferrules
• Maple fretboard with walnut dot inlays
• Chrome hardware
• Gotoh GB 707 tuning machines
• EMG Geezer PJ pickups and controls
• Hipshot Kickass bridge
• GHS Black Tapewound strings

...and now I'm realizing I haven't taken pictures yet. So...pics to follow!

 

[gormsby]

Løven pics!
​

This is the bass described in the post immediately above. Photo limited by autumn light, bad camera focus, and unskilled operator.

Below: Metallic black is a hard color to photograph. Also: half a dog.

Below left: Now there's the straight string pull we're looking for. Below right: Note the slightly oversized walnut dot inlays.

Below: Walnut/maple neck, angled neck screws shamelessly stolen from Yamaha's BB line. Belly cut shows a bit of the grain pattern coming through - I did not try for a complete grain fill, to let a bit of that peek out.

Below: Best shot I could get of the metallic black finish

 

[gormsby]

(Re) Vingen​

Another example of my silly wordplay. "Vingen" means "the wing," and was the result of my search for a word starting with "VI," because...This is a re-visioning of my first ever build, which was was motivated by a desire to find a Fender Bass VI-like instrument but with wider string spacing than Fender's, for easier finger-style playing. I couldn't find an in-production model that ticked all the boxes. Since building that first one, some of my preferences, both aesthetic and practical, changed. So I decided to build a new, improved version, and stole some parts from the original.

Specs​

• Body is a core of thermally-modified ash, with natural ash bookmatched top and back.
• 7-piece neck of maple, walnut, and white oak
• 24-fret pau ferro fretboard, 12" radius with Jescar 47104 frets, plus a zero fret
• 30" scale length
• Brass string spacer
• Pearloid dot inlays
• Hipshot A 6-string bridge
• Lace Bass Bar Alumitone pickups
• VVT control layout with neck/both/bridge selector switch
• Gotoh SG381 tuning machines
• LaBella flatwound string set for Bass VI
• String-through body
• Finishes:
  • TransTint blue dye on top and back; natural on the center core
  • Generous cellulose sanding sealer layer under topcoat, which also filled some grain
  • Melamine lacquer as body topcoat
  • Arm-R-Seal oil-based poly on face of headstock (melamine lacquer did not play well with waterslide decal)
  • Osmo PolyX semi-gloss on neck

Build notes​

• I did a string-through body design not for sonic purposes, but rather to "run out" the length of the strings: Bass VI string sets are long to accommodate the tremolo system of the Fender VI design. Without a tremolo, I had some extra length to deal with. The string-through holes are angled 45-degrees to add a bit more length behind the bridge.
• I had watched a few build videos by Tornelli Guitars that turned me on to melamine lacquer on top of cellulose sanding sealer, which I really liked -- brushes on like a nice poly, but dries in seconds, which reduces the dust and debris problem. Cures in one week rather than 4. The only problem was that that lacquer dissolves waterslide decals. So for the headstock I reverted to my tried-and-true Arm-R-Seal.
• There were some really nice whorls and swirls in the pau ferro fretboard around frets 15 to 19. Last picture.
• Getting a clean finish line between the blue-stained top (and back) and the unstained body core was tricky. Masking worked for the staining, but the cellulose sanding sealer I used between the stain and topcoat would reactivate the stain. So I did the first few layers of sealer separately on the core and top+back, masking the other parts, until I had several layers on both. Then, a final layer or two to "meld" them all together without reaching the dye, and finally the melamine topcoats. See the pic below right for the line I was dealing with: