Summer Build Off 2024 - Red Wing's gonna fly

[gormsby]

Maybe 15 months ago I caught the building bug by building a 6-string shortscale bass after deciding none of the items for sale were quite what I wanted. That one had a bass bridge and thus bass string spacing, perfect for fingerstyle playing. Now I want to fill the Fender VI niche with something a bit different.

I've discovered in the meantime that my surname is already in use by an Australian guitar maker, so I used the anyway more logo-genic family (and farm) name of my great grandfather, the Norwegian Årnes. Since I was already in the Norwegian naming mode, my first VI became "Vingen", meaning "the wing." My new one, the subject of this thread, will be red, thus Rødvingen, "the red wing." Coincidentally, Red Wing is also a town in Minnesota that hosts a luthiery school (I've never been there). Here. We. Go.

Pictured, left to right: Thermally-modified ash for body core, tuners; Hackberry tops and bottoms (will be dyed transparent red), switches, knobs and frets; maple fretboard and some walnut as a source of block inlays; walnut mains and maple stringers for the neck, truss rod; and walnut strips to use for neck binding. Smaller parts not pictured, pickups not yet delivered.

 

[gormsby]

Neck and headstock glue-up.

I've done the dowel trick for keeping things aligned during glue-up a couple times, but never liked having that dowel show up in the finished neck. I could do a larger blank and put it in a waste area, but I've had fairly good luck just clamping veeery carefully, including clamping the ends of each piece to a common waste board. Wish me luck.

Because of the geometry of finding straight grain in the large slab of walnut I had, the headstock and neck are glued up as separate pieces. They will eventually be scarf-jointed together.

Here's the neck glue up. Headstock looks just like it, but shorter

 

[gormsby]

Specs:

• Thermally-modified ash body, chambered for weight reduction
  
• Hackberry top and back
• 5-piece walnut neck with maple stringers
• 24 frets, plus a zero fret
• 30-inch scale
• Curly maple fretboard, bound and blocked with walnut
  
• Body finish: transparent red dye under Arm-R-Seal poly. I might do black edges and burst, depending on how well experiments go.
• Neck finish: Just the Arm-R-Seal
• Chrome hardware
• Gotoh SG360 tuning machines
• Fender Toronado bridge
• String-through body, 45-degree string-through holes (I have to, because Fender VI-type strings are made for the long tremolo, but I'm doing a hardtail. Have to put the extra string length somewhere. The angled string hole idea I stole from Yamaha's BB)
• Lollar Bass VI pickups in black
• Black pickguard hiding a large "everything" route-out for controls, pickups, and switches.
  
• Fender VI-style switch panel: on/off for each pickup, plus a "strangle switch" high-pass filter.
• Master volume, master tone
• I have both Fender Super 250 (24-100) and Ernie Ball 2837 (20w-90) string sets on hand, so we'll see which wins at string-up time.

For the body, I have my own design that borrows heavily from the Fender VI/JazzMaster form, but with a carve out for fret access.

About the wood:

I got my walnut, hackberry, and ash from a Minneapolis vendor, Wood from the Hood. They do local sourcing/recovery, and get a lot of storm blowdown, nuisance trees, stuff from within the city that would otherwise get chipped for mulch. Their pieces are rather large, so I have the hackberry and walnut as leftovers from a pair of guitars I built. I had barely heard of hackberry until seeing it when I walked in to Wood from the Hood one day intending to get some northern ash. The dark grain lines on the nearly white wood in the quartersawn pieces looked amazing, so I changed plans right there. For the guitar, I put just the slightest ambering stain on it, but it also takes dye very well. I have a rainbow of test blanks and they all look great: red, blue, amber, green, black and grey. You'll see the hackberry (and the walnut) again, as my other builds get rolling.

The thermally-modified ash is interesting stuff. Northern ash, but a bit lighter and more resonant with the changes in the thermo treatment. It's really brittle, and I've had bad luck trying to build full bodies with it, due to chipping and splitting. But as a body core, where you can hide the flaws with nice tops and backs, it works really well.

 

[gormsby]

Today: Neck work and body glue up:

I started with planing the neck and headstock pieces down to target thickness (3/4" and 9/16", respectively) with the big planer at my makerspace (full details and pics under my other Summer Build Off build: https://www.talkbass.com/threads/summer-build-off-2024-nivå-nee-voh-levels-up.1654862/#post-28531411). Cut the scarf joint angle on the neck piece and glued it up at home.

Finished for today with the body glue up. For this body, the piece of thermally-modifed ash that I got was a bit too narrow for two halves. So when this is ready, I'm going to carve some "ears" out of the eventual waste and add those on to meet the needed width. Thus the markings.

 

[gormsby]

A little mini-gallery of progress. Over the past few days I:

• Cut the inlay blocks from some spare walnut
• Chiseled and routed out the inlay areas on my maple fretboard
• Glued in the inlays. There was ample room in my carve outs, so now I have to figure out whether I want to fill the gaps with walnut dust, try to match the maple, or do a third, contrasting color. Or, maybe, try again with my backup neck blank and a new set of inlays, to see if I can get everything tighter.
  
• Cut the second (top) half of the scarf joint angle on the neck on a bandsaw, then leveled it to the rest of the board using my shinto rasp
• Laid out the neck geometry and determined truss rod placement
• Cut out the control cavities and chambering from the body blank. Since this is going to have a top and back added (in hackberry), I started the chambering with some forstner bit holes but did the bulk with a bandsaw. The entry cut in endgrain can be filled with a thin slice of the same wood (thermally-modified northern ash, in this case), or, for very thin kerfs, just glued and clamped shut. I did a bit of both with this one.
• Spent some desk time refining the headstock and tuning machine placement. I think I found a layout and design that minimized the to-the-side string angles while still keeping an attractive neck layout. Only ended up maybe a quarter inch narrower than my other bass designs, but gets the narrower guitar-style tuners closer in.

 

[Beej]

Looks great, and man, you're cruising...I gotta get going.

 

[gormsby]

Bit of a slow-down here. It has been alternating rain (can't work outside) and crushing heat and humidity (can't work in upstairs of garage) for over a week now, and when I can get something done, I've been working on my guitar projects now that their poly is cured. But doing what I can where I can. On this project, I radiused my first run at the inlaid fretboard, then decided I wanted to try again. The first time I did it, I had cut the inlays first, then traced them on to the board and cut the recesses. Result was recesses that were a bit too large, and the filling in of the gaps was not a good match for the walnut.

So in my second try, I cut the recesses first, then cut the inlays a bit large all around, and filed/sanded each one bit by bit until it fit. Still a few gaps, but small enough that filler won't be bad. The other change -- switched from filler matching the inlays to filler matching the board -- "maple" wood filler is more subtle than the super glue/walnut dust I used before.

Last night, cut the fret slots. This will have a zero fret, so that's one of the slots off the low end, then I'm cutting a piece to go on the other side of the string spacer, also at the low end.

 

[gormsby]

Yikes, it's been almost a month. And at this point, fair to say that I will not be meeting the finishing requirements of the Build Off -- and that's wordplay: Due to some unavailability next week, my chance to finish depends on getting the final finish coats on my entries this week. My poly of choice wants 30 days cure time, and though I've made progress, I've not made enough progress. I'll probably have bodies and necks curing on hooks in the garage when the Build Off officially ends.

That said, for Rødvingen:

• Fretboard is radiused and glued up on the neck, truss rod installed
• Frets are installed and edge-trimmed/sanded. Not yet leveled.
• Walnut edge binding installed on the fretboard and side dots added
• Neck pocket is cut in the body core (top will be routed later after glue up. I like routing in the middle piece before attaching the top/bottom, because then I can use a standard bearing bit for routing the top if the first cut works, or clean it up on the top if the routing of the core is deficient.)
• Bridge and pickup positions marked

Most of that is standard build stuff shown on this forum a million times. The one wrinkle for this build was that after getting the fretboard glued to the neck and trimmed, the inlays ended up off center. It was only obvious toward the low end (frets 1-7 or so). Fretboard and neck were both centered during glue up and before trimming the board to the neck profile -- all the centerlines matched. Best I can figure is that maybe early on, I decided to skew the neck area relative to the rectangular blank, maybe to use the grain closer to one edge than the other or something, and forgot about it later on. In any case, I worked both sides of the misaligned block inlays -- carved out maple and added some walnut on one side where it made sense, and also carved out walnut and spliced in some maple on the other side where that made sense. The results were...pretty good. I'll note here that walnut is much more forgiving than the maple, mostly because endgrain in the splicing was not an issue for the walnut blocks.


Necks (Rødvingen's on the right) after trimming to width:


During fret installation:


Repairs in progress to fix misaligned inlays:


Side dots:

 

[gormsby]

Long pause for a family vacation to Montreal. Managed to get my 13-year-old into a jazz club despite reddit's consensus that such a thing wasn't possible . Progress since returning:

• Leveled and dressed frets
• Started some pickup routing templates
• Cut out the body shape from my core piece and finished shaping with disc- and spindle sanders. For these builds, I've skipped making body templates. Since these are not models that will require production consistency between builds, and because I have good luck with the sanders, I instead just hand-shape to a line traced from my printout. The core will become the "template" for the top and back after glue-up. I'm pretty good with a router, but even so, I know the damage a router can do with a moment's inattention or a poorly-taped template, so opt for more forgiving tools wherever practical.
• With the body shape finished, I could trace the heel transition line on the neck, so back to neck work...
• Carved the main length of the neck. I use the facet method with my trusty shinto rasp. Before faceting, I used a round file to set the stop point and thickness depth on the headstock and heel ends, then carved down the back side of the neck to join those two points for the taper. Then I cut the curve facet-by-facet. This time, I used the division by half approach -- a slight change from my previous formula, which will get me a thinner-feeling neck (though the thickness is actually the same, it will remove more from the shoulders). I cut the first facet joining the half-way line between centerline and edges on the back, and between the back and the front of the neck, including the fingerboard in the "half-way" determination. Then halves again to cut two new facets, 1) between the first and the top, and 2) between the first and the sides. At that point, I have four facets on each side, and from there, I continued freehand until all the noticably sharp corners were gone. Then sanded the curve smooth with 80 grit "shoeshine style."
• Drew out my plan for the headstock and heel transitions, and did some rough carving with the shinto for those. I will clean these up later with files.