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There's another storm brewing!

#221
I haven't posted much recently, but there wasn't any single thing that was earth-shattering. Figuring, planning, ordering. So this is a catch-up post, covering a variety of things.

(My photobucket upload plug-in doesn't work any more with the latest OSX upgrade, so I'm using the PB upload page, which won't allow me to choose resolution. So, I'll apologize right here if pics come up either tiny or huge. Let me know.)

As I said a few posts ago, I've figured out the headstock design. And actually, compared to that notebook pic, it has been revised a bit.

With the layer design done, I was able to finish planning the layer material requirements and cuts.
IMG_6162.jpg


Also in this timeframe, I figured that some of the piecing of veneers I had planned for the neck was going to be difficult or impossible to line up properly. Part of this realization was after flowcharting out some of the steps that will be necessary to do this thing.
IMG_6199.jpg


I found out that the veneer supplier has some large sheets available, so along with ordering to fill the new needs, I also reshuffled my cut plans, and ordered two large pieces, to make some formerly pieced parts into single parts. I will have leftovers now, so I guess I'll have to figure a project to use them on. :)


I got my neck beam trimming jig out of storage, and assessed the damage from Sandy. One end got wet, with some swelling of the MDF and a bit of mildew. I cleaned it up, and it may be usable as is. But I also may figure a way to use the router table instead. I didn't have that for the last bass.
IMG_6186.jpg



Back to the headstock -- I planned out the usage of the boards, which up until now were left over-length and over-thickness.
DSC03615.jpg


The wenge required resawing. This would be the most demanding resaw yet for me, as far as limited room for error. Here's the cut.
DSC03617.jpg

It turned out fine.

Then the three main pieces needed to be brought down to final thickness. I decided to use the oscillating sander to do that, since the pieces are too thin for the thickness planer. First I jointed up a 4x4ish block, to use as a fence,
DSC03621.jpg

then drilled a hole through it and set it up on the sander table. The workpiece gets fed from what is normally the back of the sander.
DSC03623.jpg


I had intended for the wenge to be .060", but when I got it down to .100 one of the pieces started to cup, so I reassessed the design, and brought them both to .090 . The cup combined with the oscillation and the workpiece being wider than the belt caused some difficulty, but I worked it out.

Small curiosity -- the 4x4 was decades old, but was still so sticky-resiny after removing the outer 1/8" that it gummed up the bed and rollers of the thickness planer (which had to be cleaned up with acetone), and grabbed up wenge dust onto the block during the sanding.
DSC03625.jpg


Here are all the pieces of the headstock, ready for glue-up.
IMG_6195.jpg

Only sixteen pieces! That's four glue-ups.

In the end I should do a tally of how many individual pieces of wood went into the bass.


Also, I did a bit of trimming of the block that will be glued behind the neck beam. The "tone block, " I guess. :roll eyes:
IMG_6197.jpg



Finally, here are a few recent beers.

This one was very good. It was a while ago so I can't go into detail, but I liked it enough to buy again.
IMG_5706.jpg


This one, despite the name and style of labeling, is a Polish beer. It was not expensive, but was a decent drink.
IMG_6109.jpg


This one is a great scotch ale. Rich, full, sweet, tastes great as it warms up. Highly recommended.
IMG_6198.jpg
 
#222
pilotjones said:
I haven't posted much recently, but there wasn't any single thing that was earth-shattering. Figuring, planning, ordering. So this is a catch-up post, covering a variety of things.

(My photobucket upload plug-in doesn't work any more with the latest OSX upgrade, so I'm using the PB upload page, which won't allow me to choose resolution. So, I'll apologize right here if pics come up either tiny or huge. Let me know.)

As I said a few posts ago, I've figured out the headstock design. And actually, compared to that notebook pic, it has been revised a bit.

With the layer design done, I was able to finish planning the layer material requirements and cuts.
IMG_6162.jpg


Also in this timeframe, I figured that some of the piecing of veneers I had planned for the neck was going to be difficult or impossible to line up properly. Part of this realization was after flowcharting out some of the steps that will be necessary to do this thing.
IMG_6199.jpg
Click to expand...

Its to early, that made my head hurt :D
 
#224
Honestly, I didn't want to flow chart it out because I'm kind of resistant to doing things at home as I do at work. I want to relax. But in this case, I was having trouble getting all the steps aligned in my head for proper consideration. Charting it was very good here because as I built the chart, with various branches for different possible orders of operations, the relationships became clear. I could then prune away the branches that didn't make sense.

As far as the veneers chart, that was absolutely necessary in order to get all the proper materials in in the proper quantities and sizes.



After doing that flowchart, I can see that a chart for the entire build, to that level of detail (which is not all that detailed), would be enormous.
 
#225
pilotjones said:
Honestly, I didn't want to flow chart it out because I'm kind of resistant to doing things at home as I do at work. I want to relax. But in this case, I was having trouble getting all the steps aligned in my head for proper consideration. Charting it was very good here because as I built the chart, with various branches for different possible orders of operations, the relationships became clear. I could then prune away the branches that didn't make sense.

As far as the veneers chart, that was absolutely necessary in order to get all the proper materials in in the proper quantities and sizes.



After doing that flowchart, I can see that a chart for the entire build, to that level of detail (which is not all that detailed), would be enormous.
Click to expand...


Outside of work I usually just work down a tangent until I get stuck, then start on another. Eventually they all come together but it probably takes a lot longer.

lowsound
 
#226
In preparation for doing the headstock scarf joint, I did refiguring of centerlines, scribed a line 1.75" off the centerline on the neck beam, and band saw trimmed and then jointed to the lines. This is to have one good edge on the neck beam and the headstock ready for laying down on the table saw.

Headstock edge jointed
IMG_6229.jpg


Neck beam edge jointed
IMG_6231.jpg

I did the neck beam edge on the table router, with a straightedge as a template. My jointer has a pretty short bed, and I didn't want anything funky happening. Plus I wanted to try joining with the router.

This was tasty, not bad. A Magic Hat that I like.
IMG_6228.jpg

Two bottles side by side are kind of creepy, though.



Last night I cut the scarf cuts. It was nice having the scarf jig from the first bass already built, and the setup angles recorded in the notebook. It made the process nearly anxiety-free this time. I will say that I'm glad that I still have the practice scarf from the first time still laying around. Serves as a last sanity check that I'm not cutting the wrong side of the board or something.

Test board. After playing with the bevel angle a bit on the table saw, the resultant angle checks out as planned.
IMG_6233.jpg


Headstock, off the table saw
IMG_6239.jpg

The blade doesn't reach high enough to get all the way across. It is high enough cut the zone that will be in the final neck, though. So next is to use the flush trim saw,
IMG_6241.jpg

and done.
IMG_6242.jpg


Neck beam cut done.
IMG_6243.jpg



Refreshments.
IMG_6246.jpg

This was very good. The dark-sweetness nearly covers up the wheatiness, just a little left. Strong chocolate and raisin tastes. Also, will kick your butt.
 
#231
Thanks all! Yes, I'm happy with how cool it looks when you slice obliquely through the veneers, and the wenge -- too bad that will be hidden in the scarf joint! But there will eventually be some body carving to show it off, plus the back of the neck. And something interesting at the heel and volute. Oh, and at the sides of the fretboard.



The scarf joint is now glued and in the clamps.

I decided to use a whole lot of pins to secure the headstock to the neck beam this time, so it doesn't slip like the last bass did a little bit. Six toothpicks. I also fully figured out how to clamp the compound miter so that the clamping force is applied normal to the joint, so that technically the toothpicks wouldn't need to be there. That opened up the possibility of simultaneously doing the three veneers that are lining the scarf joint, instead of gluing the veneers, and then the headstock attachment after.

The first part was getting good support for the back of the neck beam, so as to get a good joint all the way to the upper edge of the scarf. for this I used a board that had bee cut to the same angle as the neck beam. Then I covered it with the liner paper.
Here are that board and the neck beam side by side
IMG_6249.jpg

and again stacked up, and pinned together.
IMG_6251.jpg


The wedge blocks for clamp orientation are made by taking a 2x4 and again cutting it to the same angle as the scarf cuts. Then when the blocks are rotated 180° and applied to the appropriate surfaces, they form surfaces parallel to the scarf plane. That allows the clamps to act perpendicular to that plane.

Here are pics of the dry clamp-up. You can see the clamps aligned to the scarf plane both from the side
IMG_6252.jpg

and from the end.
IMG_6254.jpg
 
#232
Here's the way it came out of the clamps.
IMG_6278.jpg


I used the jointer to trim back the extra at the top surface of the joint. I saw Lefay's video of doing something similar, so I thought I'd give it a shot. My jointer only has 4" knives, and the headstock area at its widest is wider than that, so I took off the fence so I could do multiple side-by-side passes. I know this isn't ideal and won't likely give a dead perfect result, but I was figuring on cleaning up as necessary with a hard sanding block in order to get a good enough, gluable surface.

I started by running it over with a scrap piece of veneer underneath as a spacer, just to ease into the process. This is what it looked like for the initial passes.
IMG_6293.jpg

(There's a scrap board mounted to the back of the neck. The same one that was used for clamp-up is left in place.)

After running that, then taking out the veneer and running again, and cleaning up with the sanding block, here's the result. All ready.
IMG_6296.jpg



-------------------------------


I also jointed up the wings. I cut them back until I got through the epoxy to wood on all layers. In doing so I was getting a weird situation where the head end of the board would bite, but it wouldn't cut through the middle and tail. After checking parallelism of the tables , rethinking my jointer technique, and anything else I could think of, I found that the knives were dull in the area I was using. I shifted the fence over to expose a different area of the knives, and had no problems.
IMG_6299.jpg


After doing that I realized that I had created beautiful, sharp edges, that were highly likely to be destroyed before I got to glue-up. Time for some blue tape.
IMG_6304.jpg



-------------------------------


I've been doing a few design studies for varying the headstock a bit from last time, doing some carving. On the right is the template used on the first bass. So far I don't like either of the studies, but I've got an idea to try for a third one.
IMG_6305.jpg
 
#235
iamlowsound said:
I love the detail that you put into your work. This bass is going to be fantastic!

lowsound
Click to expand...
Thanks!

T-34 said:
Only now I am starting to understand what this bass will look like :)
Click to expand...
Me too!


------------------


Today I just did some more study on the headstock. I trimmed down the wide #2 and have something that I might use.

This is making me wonder whether I should mock up a full-scale body, rather than winging it based only on the CAD I did before.
 
#240
dannster said:
Anything new with these?
Click to expand...
I'm held up at this point by a bottleneck. The whole process is waiting for the truss rod, so I can cut its channel. After that point, the process fans back out into different areas -- things wouldn't be so interdependent if i weren't making a neck-thru with a full-length fretboard that also overlays the body wings, and if the crazy extensive laminations weren't a factor.

The truss rod should be arriving shortly. It's a titanium/aluminum design. I wanted it to be as light as possible, so that it the neck is light enough, I can do some body body chambering without getting neck dive.


Pickups are also on order.
 

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