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Triple Bucker 4 string build

Will_White

Will_White

Jul 1, 2011
4,173
5,802
Salem, OR
#1
So I'm going to start my first "conventional" solid body scratch build but I have a couple of things I need some thoughts on. I don't have a bandsaw, or a space for one, I only have a sabre saw so my max cut thickness is only about a 1/2-3/4", my plan is to make a master body template, rough cut 3, 1/2" and 2 1/8" baltic birch plywood panels, including neck pocket, pickup routes, chambering and control cavity, glue everything up using locating pins, use the master body template and a template bit in the router to get everything flush, 1/4" / 3/8" round over around the whole body, 5/8" or 3/4" as sort of a belly cut/forearm relief. Does that seem like a decent plan so far, any thoughts or opinions.
 
#2
I am just a little bit ahead of you with my body cut out and I received, Friday all of my hardware, controls and pups. I have a couple of questions:

  • Are you saying that you are going to build your first from plywood? Is there a reason? Is it the limitation of your saw to cut it out?
  • I am not sure I understand the comment that you can only make a 1/2-3/4" in. cut. I must assume we are talking about using a hand held Jig Saw? 2 weeks ago, I cut my body out of 2" thick poplar. While I had to do slowly and carefully and it took half an hour to cut it out. . . .it worked really well. Not to sound like an ass. . . you do realize that you can buy blades for your saw that are up to 3" long and will handle a couple inch thick piece of solid wood?
  • It is entirely possible that I misunderstood, if you would like a "hardwood" body, I am going to highly recommend what I did. Went to a local cabinet maker's shop where they sell lumber. Bought a nice piece of poplar and had them plane it to the thickness I wanted. Out the door it cost me $15 so if I goof it up, I can start over with little loss of money.

Not sure where you are on tooling. . . .like you I do not have all that I WANT but all that I need to work with. The one piece that I have found totally invaluable to this point is the Rigid Spindle, Belt sander that was recommended here! What a HUGE time saver. I will say that when I cut with my $20 Lowes, Skill Jig Saw, it is far from perfect and far from 90 degrees to the surface BUT the spindle sander makes short work of that. In addition, when you cut out your templates, the 1/2" spindle will fit "inside" what you just cut out. If you are very careful, you can work to your lines then finish with a file and some sandpaper as a final before you mount it and route.

I am waiting for everybody to start stirring here at my house and I will be firing up the router to cut: My second of 2 pups, my control cavity, a battery box and control cover for my auxiliary lighting. I hope to make some wood shavings fly here in a couple of minutes!

Good luck, please share your results so that you, me and other total rooks can learn from each other!

Brent
 
#3
I too, am a member of the bandsawless minority. I use my handheld jigsaw to rough cut all my bodies and necks. I have used it through up to 2" thick pieces of maple, mahogany, ash, walnut, alder along with thinner pieces of wenge purpleheart and many other very dense hard woods.
Like @earlysecond said, you can get a longer blade and go to town with your jigsaw! One thing to be aware of though is that the blade can tend to wander away from vertical in curves, so if you are right on your line at the top, the bottom could be well beyond it. So you need to allow more leeway to either be routed or sanded off after. Good luck!
 
#4
Me as well. Using the jigsaw to rough-cut and the router table with template bits to finish off. It's a balancing act, because as @gsnad2000 says, you don't want your jigsaw blade to wander inside your line, but you also don't want to leave too much wood for the router. Sometimes some interim sanding is in order...
 
#5
$10 at Sears
spin_prod_1152593912?hei=624&wid=624&op_sharpen=1.jpg
 
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#7
earlysecond said:
I am just a little bit ahead of you with my body cut out and I received, Friday all of my hardware, controls and pups. I have a couple of questions:


  • Are you saying that you are going to build your first from plywood? Is there a reason? Is it the limitation of your saw to cut it out?
  • I am not sure I understand the comment that you can only make a 1/2-3/4" in. cut. I must assume we are talking about using a hand held Jig Saw? 2 weeks ago, I cut my body out of 2" thick poplar. While I had to do slowly and carefully and it took half an hour to cut it out. . . .it worked really well. Not to sound like an ass. . . you do realize that you can buy blades for your saw that are up to 3" long and will handle a couple inch thick piece of solid wood?
  • It is entirely possible that I misunderstood, if you would like a "hardwood" body, I am going to highly recommend what I did. Went to a local cabinet maker's shop where they sell lumber. Bought a nice piece of poplar and had them plane it to the thickness I wanted. Out the door it cost me $15 so if I goof it up, I can start over with little loss of money.

Not sure where you are on tooling. . . .like you I do not have all that I WANT but all that I need to work with. The one piece that I have found totally invaluable to this point is the Rigid Spindle, Belt sander that was recommended here! What a HUGE time saver. I will say that when I cut with my $20 Lowes, Skill Jig Saw, it is far from perfect and far from 90 degrees to the surface BUT the spindle sander makes short work of that. In addition, when you cut out your templates, the 1/2" spindle will fit "inside" what you just cut out. If you are very careful, you can work to your lines then finish with a file and some sandpaper as a final before you mount it and route.

I am waiting for everybody to start stirring here at my house and I will be firing up the router to cut: My second of 2 pups, my control cavity, a battery box and control cover for my auxiliary lighting. I hope to make some wood shavings fly here in a couple of minutes!

Good luck, please share your results so that you, me and other total rooks can learn from each other!

Brent
Click to expand...
Yes I am planning on using plywood for my first body, not the super cheap stuff from the hardware store that's full of voids and has a thin hardwood veneer over a pine core, but good quality baltic birch plywood with a thick face veneer and void free birch core.

Maybe after little bit of my background it will make more sense. My other hobby is building skateboards (longboards) and in that discipline we use baltic birch plywood or vacuum bag laminated maple because it's stiffer then solid wood by weight and it's fairly easy to work with, same reason it's used in speaker cabs. Now to me stiff and light and inexpensive sounds like an ideal material for an electric bass body.

Now about the thickness limit, I was planning on doing this build a little while ago but I had some doubts on if my jigsaw could cut it or not so I bought a long blade and grabbed a scrap of 2x6 and glued a print out of the upper horn area onto it and went at with my jigsaw, it took forever and once I was done I inspected the work and the blade had wandered almost 3/8" from the top to bottom, I don't want to have to take that much off with the router or a spindle sander.

After that I decided to use thinner pieces glued together and that's when the idea of using plywood occurred to me, it would hide the seams as they would just be part of the "grain". Using thinner pieces also meant that I could cut chambering, the control cavity and rough out the neck pocket all with the sabre saw and not with forstner bits in the drill press, and the router. And that's where I'm at now.
 
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#8
Something else came to my mind that I want sure about, I'm using one of the low profile double acting truss rods from stewmac and I was wondering about neck reinforcement I was initially thinking to go with carbon fiber but I remembered reading a few posts by @Bruce Johnson where he talked about using aluminum reinforcing strips. Any thoughts on which would be more stable, I've worked with aluminum alot in the past so now I'm toward that.
 
#11
Will_White said:
Now about the thickness limit, I was planning on doing this build a little while ago but I had some doubts on if my jigsaw could cut it or not so I bought a long blade and grabbed a scrap of 2x6 and glued a print out of the upper horn area onto it and went at with my jigsaw, it took forever and once I was done I inspected the work and the blade had wandered almost 3/8" from the top to bottom, I don't want to have to take that much off with the router or a spindle sander.
Click to expand...
A jigsaw can actually cut pretty straight, but the key is to let the saw do the work itself. You have to feed the material very slowly in order to maintain a vertical cut or the blade can wander as you've described. Its similar to a bandsaw or scrollsaw as well - if you feed the material too quickly, the blade will deflect and you run the risk of breakage, burning and less-than-vertical cuts. When working it very slowly, and with practice, you'll find your cuts work out better. Like most things, it improves with practice.

Over my own experience as a carpenter, as a general rule of thumb, if a tool functions correctly but does not work for you, its almost always a practice issue...
 
#13
Will, if you are building the neck out of oak, I don't think you need to worry about adding extra reinforcements. Oak is a very strong wood. And if it decides to warp, carbon fiber or aluminum bars won't do much good stopping it anyway. Make sure the oak is thoroughly dried out and stabilized, use good practice in aligning the growth rings and grain, and you'll get a solid, stable neck.

By the way, the trick to shaping oak is to use files. Rasps will tend to rip away the soft wood between the hard lines. Start with a large sharp half-round Bastard file. Work down to a Smooth or #2 Swiss. Get it as smooth as you can with files before you touch it with sandpaper. Only sand it lightly with 220 or finer, on a hard block. Coarser sandpaper will rip the soft wood and leave a washboard surface.
 
#14
Bruce Johnson said:
Will, if you are building the neck out of oak, I don't think you need to worry about adding extra reinforcements. Oak is a very strong wood. And if it decides to warp, carbon fiber or aluminum bars won't do much good stopping it anyway. Make sure the oak is thoroughly dried out and stabilized, use good practice in aligning the growth rings and grain, and you'll get a solid, stable neck.

By the way, the trick to shaping oak is to use files. Rasps will tend to rip away the soft wood between the hard lines. Start with a large sharp half-round Bastard file. Work down to a Smooth or #2 Swiss. Get it as smooth as you can with files before you touch it with sandpaper. Only sand it lightly with 220 or finer, on a hard block. Coarser sandpaper will rip the soft wood and leave a washboard surface.
Click to expand...
I was planning on using a 3/4" roundover bit to do the bulk of the shaping, I like a flat D profile. Would that work ok?
 
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#18
earlysecond said:
I'm diggin that Will. Good luck What is your pup set up? Maybe you already said?
Click to expand...
It is three power rails humbuckers from GFS two 15k at the bridge and a 10k at the neck. Going down from that to the row of switches from right to left is a series/split/parallel each for the neck and middle pickups, then a north/series/south coil split for the bridge pickup so it will hum cancel with either the neck or middle split then a standby switch, and one more I'll get to in a little bit. Going down to the row of knobs, left to right this time, is a 4 way switch for the bridge and middle pickups which goes into the last switch on the top row, a bass cut. Next is another 4 way between the output of the bass cut switch and the neck pickup, then a master TBX tone control (cuts bass and treble on one knob) and a 1 meg volume. Because I have the option to have 6 coils in series, I might experiment with passive clipping diodes also.
TLDR: three power rails, splits for each pickup, two 4 way switches, volume, tone, kill switch.
 
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#19
Will_White said:
It is three power rails humbuckers from GFS two 15k at the bridge and a 10k at the neck. Going down from that to the row of switches from right to left is a series/split/parallel each for the neck and middle pickups, then a north/series/south coil split for the bridge pickup so it will hum cancel with either the neck or middle split then a standby switch, and one more I'll get to in a little bit. Going down to the row of knobs, left to right this time, is a 4 way switch for the bridge and middle pickups which goes into the last switch on the top row, a bass cut. Next is another 4 way between the output of the bass cut switch and the neck pickup, then a master TBX tone control (cuts bass and treble on one knob) and a 1 meg volume. Because I have the option to have 6 coils in series, I might experiment with passive clipping diodes also.
Click to expand...

Oh man I got dizzy just reading that!
 
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