Grizz's first bass build

[Hopkins]

Really all I wanted to do was deepen the figure. I think from now on I wouldn't bother with this method. I'll stick with the shellac and lacquer or poly route.

To make the figure pop more, a honey amber or even light brown dye sanded back works much better in my experience, black is not a good choice for doing a natural looking finish. I would only dye black and sand back if I were doing a trans red,blue, green or another color that would hide those black specks.

If I were you, I would sand what you have there back, then go with a trans blue, or even a trans wine red color. The dye would make the grain pop under the translucent finish.

 

[Jonny5bass]

To make the figure pop more, a honey amber or even light brown dye sanded back works much better in my experience, black is not a good choice for doing a natural looking finish. I would only dye black and sand back if I were doing a trans red,blue, green or another color that would hide those black specks.

If I were you, I would sand what you have there back, then go with a trans blue, or even a trans wine red color. The dye would make the grain pop under the translucent finish.

I have been mulling this over all day. I debated sanding back again, doing the black, sanding back again and then trying the trans blue but I think I'd end up at the same spot. I don't have any equipment to spray with so I was planning on using rattle cans for the clear. With no way to dye the rattle can, I'd end up having to rub in a dye again anyway. I have some little glue spots I have to sand out again so I will work on that tonight and maybe see if I can quickly do a 150 through 220 grit sanding of the whole thing and see where it stands. Thank you for the input and pointers, they certainly are not falling on deaf ears.

 

[Hopkins]

I have been mulling this over all day. I debated sanding back again, doing the black, sanding back again and then trying the trans blue but I think I'd end up at the same spot. I don't have any equipment to spray with so I was planning on using rattle cans for the clear. With no way to dye the rattle can, I'd end up having to rub in a dye again anyway. I have some little glue spots I have to sand out again so I will work on that tonight and maybe see if I can quickly do a 150 through 220 grit sanding of the whole thing and see where it stands. Thank you for the input and pointers, they certainly are not falling on deaf ears.

You can get translucent colors in rattle cans

Invalid Link Removed
Amazon.com: Transparent Blue Enamel Paint 3oz Spray Can: Toys & Games

 

[Jonny5bass]

I decided to sand it back a bit, darken up the edges and put a couple light coats all over. I'm liking where it's at now so I'm going take a break and come back to it and see what I think.

 

[Jonny5bass]

Well after not liking the outcome, sanding back, re-dyeing, not liking, sanding back, and re-dyeing several times I decided to get out my black dye to do the sides for the blue burst. Some days you shouldn't even go into the shop....

I was using little pieces of old shirt to do the blue dye but when I pulled out the black dye it had a little wool dauber that came with it. So I decided to use it. Immediately a huge streak of black dye about 3 inches wide went running down the back. It made me a little grumpy to say the least. So I figured, in for a penny, in for a pound and dyed the whole back black.

At least there weren't any problems with the black dye. It went on and completely penetrated with no stupid little bubbles or drying issues. I ended up with this (thumbnails anyway because it changed).



So after that I continued fighting to get the dye correct on the front with little luck. I wanted to get it correct so I could use some of the rattle cans of lacquer I have been collecting for the clear. After finally giving up on that notion I did what @Hopkins suggested and tinted some of the water based varathane I had on hand (after the awesome post Drake, Bruce Johnson and other folks) and got some of the Preval sprayers and went to town. Hopkins was absolutely right again. The color came out much more uniform and looking way better, but with some evidence of poor spray technique.

My wife came out to the garage while I was sanding down some runs and was upset about the back being black so I sanded that back again too. A couple light coats of dye, then a couple coats of color spray and a bunch of coats of clear got me to this.

I'm not sure if I should be happy about the orange peel or not but it sure feels like I've made a huge leap for some reason. I'm going to start level sanding today if I can. Also, the color difference between the back and front is not as drastic as it is in the pictures. It's still magic to me that a phone can take pictures at all! I'm anxious to see how the level sanding goes and if I'll have problems with witness lines. Hopefully not because the water based Varathane stuff is great to work with. I was able to spray a light coat, do a small project for 10 mins or so, spray another coat, repeat ad nauseaum. It really does dry fast.

Hopefully someone gets something from the issues I've hit with this.

 

[Hopkins]

That looks pretty good for a Preval sprayer. I don't know much about spraying water based, but it looks like you could stand to spray a slightly heavier coat. It orange peels because such a light coat flashes off before it has a chance to flow out. But then again, @Bruce Johnson has alot of experience with water based lacquers and he recommends light coats, and I would definitely trust his judgement. Something that may be worth looking into is to see if they make a retarder for the water based stuff, it will keep it from flashing off so fast and will cut down on orange peel, and will keep it from blushing if it gets to humid outside.

 

[Jonny5bass]

When I first sprayed I went pretty heavy hoping to get it to flow out to a gloss but it ended up cratering pretty badly. I guess I should've mentioned that I did thin this a bit with Wagners (now called Titan) Paint Easy. This batch was 16 ounces of varathane with 2 ounces of the paint easy. Not sure if it helped or not.

Today I level sanded and put 3 more very light coats on and got to this;

I was very happy that while level sanding I didn't see any witness lines. Not sure if they would show up when I go to buff or not but when I've worked with poly on other projects the witness lines showed up at the sanding phase. Fingers crossed! It may be worth noting that I used a 600 grit Mirka Abralon disc on my ROS for level sanding and it worked great. The holes don't line up exactly so I had to pull the vacum hose out of my porter cable ROS and vacuum the disc pretty often. Small price to pay for being able to do it with a sander though.

 

[Jonny5bass]

Not sure why the text got so small at the end there...

 

[Jonny5bass]

Finally Done! And it survived it's first gig!

I don't have any decent pictures of it yet but here are a couple thumbnails of the two pics I do have. One immediately after assembly and another late night pic that I didn't know my wife took right after I got done doing the setup.



All things considered, I am pretty happy with it. There are some definite mistakes but it plays well and more importantly sounds better than I ever imagined it could.

I wanted to share some of the (ok, many) things that I learned along the way. Hopefully it will help somebody else embarking on their first build. This may get lengthy....

Design/layout
First things first. Do an actual layout on paper with a center line. If you have the skills to use CAD, do it. Otherwise use good old fashioned pencil, paper and straight edges. For this first build I just traced out my existing 5 string jazz on some MDF and went to work which caused some issues later on.

Template creation
I made all of my templates out of 1/4" mdf and I didn't spend much time refining the edges and curves. A little imperfection on a 1/4" template turns into a big one on 1"+ stock.

Neck
I attempted the facet method of shaping the neck by eyeballing some measurements and going for it. From the 7th fret up it turned out great but between the 1st and 7th fret it's reminiscent of a Louisville slugger. A lot of bass players I know would hate it but I actually kind of enjoy it. It feels like it forces proper technique in the lower frets.

A much better technique I found on here (of course after I finished the shaping) was to use contour gauges at the 1st, 7th and 12th frets, trace those onto paper within the measurements of your raw neck dimensions. Then draw 45 deg angles at the corners that just touch the contours. Measure those distances from the edges of raw material and you have your first set of facets. Not sure if that makes any sense but a better explanation can be found here Invalid Link Removed

Body
I'm sure there is plenty but I really only remember a couple issues. #1- Triple check the depth of your control cavity/thickness of top vs. the length of your pots. At one point I thought I was done with the woodworking and could move to finishing but luckily did a test fit and found that the top was too thick to get the threaded section of the pots through. #2- Use a router table to do roundovers. I had a couple dings around the horns where I didn't think about how the router would be supported. A couple wobbles and the dam holding back the raging river of profanity was shattered.

Prepping for finish
If you think you are done sanding, you're not. Do another few passes to get all the scratches you can't see smoothed out.

Finishing
I really need to get better at it. I started with the Preval sprayers and as you can see in the earlier posts I had some really bad orange peel. I don't think I had it thinned enough. After seeing @Lonnybass's spalted project using the same stuff but in rattle can form I switched to that and had much better results. Still not great but acceptable for me for a bass that won't be sold and will probably be beaten pretty good. In the hotrod world it would probably be a 10/10 finish (looks good going 10 mph 10 feet away). The main thing I learned is that I just need to practice finishing on anything to find something that works for me.

Hopefully somebody finds this helpful or at least entertaining in a laughable sort of way . I will try to get some decent photos up here soon.

 

[Jonny5bass]

As promised here are some pics of the finished product. Apologies for the terrible pics but all I have is my phone and a little bit of daylight left. The setting sun made them look a little more golden than in reality.