Special Edition Build Off: Gurathnaka

[PDX Rich]

Gurathnaka - Eater of Dreams, Shadow of the Night A shadowy incorporeal entity dwelling in the Dreamlands. <---Cthulhu mythos

One of three unfinished builds I current am resurrecting. For the challenge, however, this is the one I am going with since it actually has all the parts, aside from a nut, pots, jack and switch...but I can get those ordered cheaply and easily enough.

Where am I in the build..... looks like I need to make sure the surfaces are flat, then I can cut the scarf, prep the scarf, glue the scarf and move on to truss rod routing/installation and so forth.

This bass is for a good friend of mine down in the Los Angle-ease (spoken as Sam Elliot) area. He had sent me a hand drawing which I traced in Inkscape (I have not moved in the realm of 3D quite yet, aside from basic construction stuff in Sketchup).

Disposition: Neck-Through
Strings: 4
Scale: 34"
Frets: 22 EVO Gold from LMII(FW9665) --excellent stuff!
Body Wood: Cherry/Walnut sandwich
Neck Wood: walnut/maple (w/m/w/m/w)
Fingerboard: Pau Ferro (LMII pre-slotted since I do not have proper saw kerf)
Headstock Plate: Pau Ferro
Scarf: 13-15 degrees
Nut: 40mm bone
Bridge: Hipshot bent plate
Tuners: Gotoh
Pickup 1: Fender P ('58 style)
Pickup 2: Fender J (Fralin)
Electronics: Passive
Control Layout: Volume, 3-way switch, tone

 

[ctmullins]

Nice. I like nearly everything about this (sorry, I’m just a soapbar guy at heart....)!

 

[PDX Rich]

Nice. I like nearly everything about this (sorry, I’m just a soapbar guy at heart....)!

No worries on the PUPs man! I have another build with Nordstrands you may enjoy.

 

[Dark Horse]

That’s gonna be a beauty !

 

[Mr.Ben]

I'm excited! Looking forward to watching this Elder God come to life.

 

[PDX Rich]

Me too!

Looks like I will be applying some sort of stain(dark red or blue/green) as well. Will need to do some feasibility testing...

 

[PDX Rich]

What do you guys think about using pau ferro as the scarf off cut headstock? Too oily? I think it would be a cool design component to tie in with fretboard.
And I wouldn’t have to plate the headstock to hide glue joint.

I was thinking to transition the neck blank to a thin piece of maple or walnut to a full on pau ferro headstock that I would mill to size.

 

[ctmullins]

Mmmmm, Pau Ferro...

I love the idea. My only concern would be balance, as Pau Ferro is one of the heavier woods.

 

[PDX Rich]

Mmmmm, Pau Ferro...

I love the idea. My only concern would be balance, as Pau Ferro is one of the heavier woods.

ah yes that is an excellent point. The body is half cherry half walnut so not exactly a heavyweight. Plus it is fairly thin and compact, as I prefer in guitar bodies.

I have a cool offcut walnut chunk I pulled from a bin I could potentially mill down. Or, I can stick with the same neck blank and do a top plate of pau ferro.

 

[ctmullins]

It all depends. The cherry I've used in the past was pretty dense and heavy...

 

[PDX Rich]

Yup. This cherry is stable and lightweight (love cherry!). I will have to do some weight testing with the various options. Easiest and most wood-efficient usage will be to just use the scarf offcut as the headstock and plate the top with the 1/8" pau ferro I have (after adding ears, of course).

I still want to transition the scarf joint though so I am not as worried about lining up the stringers. Maybe some flamey maple? I've never done a scarf with a fancy accent so I am grasping for ideas to keep the build fresh and advance my skillset.

Edit: I am not worried about the scarf joint cut or glue-up--done that before and am pretty confident there. I have not done a transition, however. I think they are a cool style element and do not harm the joint strength if done correctly.

 

[PDX Rich]

So the shop time I had today was about flattening the neck, which had twisted a tiny bit and/or suffered from my mediocre woodcrafting:

And marking with crayon as to not go overboard...

Scale Length and alignment still good:

And I really like these StewMac lo-pro truss rods!

 

[PDX Rich]

After consulting with my friend, we are looking at doing solid walnut for headstock, with thin-ish figured maple transition. I am liking this idea, and can use the neck cutoff for another project (I try to have very little waste). Actually, the first cutoff from neck blank thinning will be a regular or baritone guitar neck! yay!

 

[PDX Rich]

I have some goofy-looking walnut to resaw and make into something fun.

 

[PDX Rich]

Man, shipping is rough these days. I should probably order the pots, knobs, nut, etc....

So, I needed to do a couple things before progressing with this build:

First off, I needed a new crosscut sled (not going to document the build here):

Just a simple sled with hickory runners. Base is 1/2" baltic birch plywood with double 3/4" baltic birch plywood fences. I routed a channel for T-Track on rear fence, and added a safety block on the back. I still need to make a stop block, which will have a spline to fit the T-track to keep things square.

Then, I needed to replace my stock guide bearings on my Rikon 10-325 14" bandsaw with tool-less, and much-upgraded bearings. A snap to install as well. Yay me!

Still not tracking perfectly through a cut, but I may just need a better blade. Anyways, after all of that and I decided to go with my table saw and Incra miter gauge to do the scarf cut. Carry on!

I will stick with the table saw for scarf cuts, until I do a neck too wide for the cut. This was smooth though, in 4 passes of incremental blade raising.

I went ahead and planed the headstock end down to 15mm. You will notice the length is rather...lengthy on the headstock cutoff. Well, when you have a crappy planer, the extra length comes in handy to deal with the sniping. Yeah, a sled would work great here to cut down/cancel the board rocking as it enters/exits the blades.

There will be not as much surface flattening before glue-up.

Scarf glue-up and truss rod channel routing to follow. Hopefully I can progress more quickly since I took care of parts-ordering needs.

 

[Mr.Ben]

I can smell the wood.