Violin bass

[Scoops]

Got the binding in, smoothed out the transition from the body to the binding, sanded off the last coat of shellac, put on a new coat of shellac. I used a different color than the last coats. I think I like the darker stuff more.

Haven't decided what the final finish will be. I might do a french polish on this. Might use the shellac as a pore filler and have a friend shoot it with Nitro. Don't know yet. If I go back to work soon, which is a very distinct possibility, I will have a friend shoot.

Cheers!

 

[Scoops]

Ran into a bit of a bug-a-boo.

In fitting this together to see if everything aligned, for some reason, the neck is sitting about .125" too high. OK, don't quite know how this happened, but it did.

I have a number of different ways to recover from this.
1) Sink the neck pocket. This is probably the best approach, but also the most difficult. The top is carved, and I don't have a flat surface to mount the neck pocket template to. What makes this more challenging is that I have a 4 degree tilt in the pocket.
2) Shave the thickness of the neck. This way will be easier, but there is risk. The total thickness of the neck as it is now is 1.05". It will be an easy task to shave this down to .95", but I really don't want to go too much thinner than this at the 12th fret. and judging by my math I'm still .025 short. But because this is ebony, and it is much denser than hard maple, I should be able to go a tad thinner.
3) Put an incline in the heal of the neck. This will be a bit trickier to get right, but I'm thinking this will get me to where I want to go.
4) Shim the neck pocket. Utilizing this approach, I'll have to put the shim not at the very end of the body, not at the end of the neck. It will look a bit awkward, but it will work.
5) I do have a little room in raising the bridge, but don't want to do this as this bridge is such an ugly monster already. Raising it only makes it uglier.

So a little later today, I'll be attempting to get this back to where it will work. I'll start with taking about .050" off the fingerboard. I'll then shave about .050" off the heal. I'll see where that gets me. and I'll figure out next steps from there.

 

[Gilmourisgod]

It sounds like you already have the least painful solution in the works. Altering the neck pocket would be tough now, short of building an elaborate routing jig to get the the angles right over a carved body. I've done precisely one compound angle neck pocket, a replacement body for my Steinberger, and it was a huge PITA. It came out well in the end, but I wouldnt want to do it again.

 

[Scoops]

It came out well in the end, but I wouldn't want to do it again.

Agreed

As far as the work on the this, got it back into shape, and just in time to take the Wife out for a nice Valentines Day Meal.
Essentially, I took about .075" off the fingerboard, and cut a slight incline into the neck.