First, I made a sled with a rail set at 13 degrees to cut the headstock scarfs. I thought I had a photo but apparently I don't. After getting the headstocks cut off, all three neck blanks went into a router planing jig to get flattened and trued up.
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Full credit to our own
@Bruce Johnson for the inspiration to use router planing jigs on these parts. It's certainly the easiest method.
Once the blanks were true, I slid a wedge under the blanks and planed the face of the scarf joint true.
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Buncha guitar necks!
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Glued the headstocks all back on and then took a break from instruments to throw something together with the scraps. I didn't want my wife to feel left out so I made a little jewelry tray from the leftover curly maple (from the guitar necks) and a cutoff of thin cherry for the bottom. Just simple rabbet/dado joints in the corners and a slot along the bottom of each side for the bottom, which is floating so it'll be able to move with the seasons:
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Once it was fit and glued, I took it back to the table saw and cut slots along each long edge, and I cut matching sticks of cherry from the cutoff on the back of the bass neck:
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The cherry strips will lock the rabbets in the dados. Not that they were going anywhere, but I like it when a "structural" element like this is also a nice visual detail. After gluing in the cherry strips I cut little square pegs to plug the ends of the slot from the bottom, sanded it, and put a coat of poly on it:
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Okay, back to the instruments. Once the scarfs on the necks were glued, I put them back in the router planing jig and planed the faces flat to clean up the scarfs. I made a boo boo with one of the guitar necks, there was a big bit of sawdust under where it clamps to the jig, which meant that it got planed to about a 4 degree angle instead of perfectly flat. I guess I'll have to save that neck for a guitar with a carved top, and use the other one for the corvette.
Once the necks were done, I put them aside and planed the cherry body wings flat and true, in the same router jig:
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I put the cherry up to the neck and re-sketched the body outline, this time including marking out the 12th and 24th frets, the soundhole (no, its not round!) and the bridge. I LOVE LOVE LOVE this part of the process. There are few things in life as satisfying as sketching on wood with chalk.
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I should also mention that when I was laying out the neck to cut the scarf, I decided to do this as a 32" scale bass. I have only ever had 34" basses and I feel like the 32" length will fit with the overall character I want for this. It'll help keep it a little lighter and more compact, too. I slid the bridge pretty far down towards the tail, too, which combined with the shorter scale has the effect of pulling the whole neck down into the body quite a bit. I was hoping to set this up as a two octave (24 fret) fingerboard, but the 24th position was REALLY deep into the body (near the middle of the soundhole) given those changes. So, it'll be more like a 22 fret bass.
After the sketching (which involved re-drawing the lower horn about a billion times) I got out the jigsaw and cut the pieces out:
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Turns out there was a bass inside those old pieces of discarded furniture practice!
