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What's On Your Workbench?

#3,941
dwizum said:
I generally thin acoustic tops, backs and sides down to around 1/16" on my tiny little Jet drum sander and it does it very well. I've done a couple pieces down to probably .04" to do laminated panels.

A lot of bigger drum sanders list 1/8" as a minimum thickness but I'm sure there are ways around that (put your workpiece on a carrier or something).
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Gotcha. It really comes down to how well the feed rollers work on any given machine. Our sander goes down to .045, just over 1/32" or so but I can also stack parts and get them down to legitimate veneer thicknesses if I'm careful with it. The disadvantage of bigger machine is that the feed rollers are further apart and require longer length parts to get pulled through effectively. Our small single head sander will handle a piece as short as 10" but the 3 head machine requires parts to be 20" minimum length.
 
#3,945
the baint said:
@Panada What??? I feel dumb that I've NEVER considered this, but it seems like an obviously awesome papier mache project to do. Great job!
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It starts with a beach ball covered in papier mache, spends a weekend as a glowing helmet of demonic intensity for a nine-year-old, and presumably retires as the resonator of a washtub bass. But probably not.
 
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#3,946
Finally decided to put my junk room to better use. My garage has always been packed tight between my wood and tools and I dont have an easily accessible bench for wiring and setups. I cleared out the spare bedroom and moved in all my wood racks. I've got all my rough lumber and necks/bodies stored in here which is great. There's no sawdust in here so everything stays clean and the inside of my home is far more climate controlled than the garage and better for lumber storage. I also had four reject wall cabinets sides that were line bored for shelves so I made two shelf cabinets for storing wood scraps, spare parts, and other odds and ends. I need to make a few more shelves to finish them out.

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The bigs racks hold all my rough lumber and necks blanks and I have a free standing shelf that holds bodies, tops, fingerboards, and other random pieces.

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That takes care of the wood storage, now a setup bench. At my job we've been going through huge amounts of maple and instead of throwing out the long rip drops I cut them down and glued them together into solid panels and surfaced them down to 1". I mitred two of them together to make the waterfall top and used the other two as sides for the cabinet. I used some purple heart and ziricote keys to strengthen the miter and give it some style.

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I took the rest of the scraps and glued them into 6" wide panels and surfaced them down to 1/2" to make the box and the shelves above the bench. I keyed the corners of the boxes to match the bench top.

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Most of the shelves are removable and the upper section has room to mount a small TV to distract me while I do my wiring.

20211031_125709.jpg
 
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#3,947
Came across this Carvin 5 string with case. Has usual truss rod issue, a broken tuner and someone bored through the neck in a couple of places. So deciding what to do. At the very least the fretboard is coming off and the truss rod replaced. so I will have choice of fretboard replacement and even fretless if I so desire. I will have to consider what to do with the neck yet. Maybe replace the whole unit with a pretty lam job. I believe the body might be Koa.
IMG_7566.JPG
 
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#3,952
Slidlow said:
Yes bored from top and bottom:rollno:. I think they might have been trying to get rid of a rattling truss rod:(. Initial look and it seems the rod is fine:meh:!
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Who does that? Anyway, I assume it would not be hard to fill the holes and then you have what should be a pretty awesome bass for cheap (at least I assume it was cheap).

Related question: are rattling truss rods a thing? I expect if you put even a little tension on one the rattle should go away.
 
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#3,953
Jeff Siddall said:
Who does that? Anyway, I assume it would not be hard to fill the holes and then you have what should be a pretty awesome bass for cheap (at least I assume it was cheap).

Related question: are rattling truss rods a thing? I expect if you put even a little tension on one the rattle should go away.
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I've come across a rare on that rattles. The holes are already plugged and yes it was less then the value of the case. I am weighing my options which include replacing the whole neck if necessary. My problem would be saving the waterslide logo on the headstock.
 
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#3,954
Jeff Siddall said:
Who does that? Anyway, I assume it would not be hard to fill the holes and then you have what should be a pretty awesome bass for cheap (at least I assume it was cheap).

Related question: are rattling truss rods a thing? I expect if you put even a little tension on one the rattle should go away.
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Unfortunately, they can make noise even under tension. A while back I forgot to put a few blobs of silicone in the TR slot on a bass and it rattles, even while under tension. Actually it's more of an echo - hard to describe, but there can be an audible clunk/click when putting it down, or tapping on the instrument. You can hear it and also feel it.

I chased that sound for days until I went through the pic library of the build and realized I must have not put anything in the TR slot and that it was the TR moving in the slot. This is a shrink wrapped DADR TR so in theory should not be noisy. I think it happened because if you look at a TR from the side while under expansive tension, it forms sort of an oval shape (arced up/down in middle, but fixed on ends). Under tension in the slot, the middle has good contact along the slot with the top and bottom, but the butt end is "floating" in the slot and must be coming into contact with the top or bottom of the slot making the "clunk" sound. With a blob of silicone, this clunk would be prevented.

With a DASR design (like Bruce's), this whole thing would be entirely prevented. And hence that's the final straw for me and I'm working on using DASR rods exclusively once I can sort out how to make them happen with my preferred super thin neck design. :thumbsup:
 
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#3,955
Slidlow said:
I've come across a rare on that rattles. The holes are already plugged and yes it was less then the value of the case. I am weighing my options which include replacing the whole neck if necessary. My problem would be saving the waterslide logo on the headstock.
Click to expand...

Nice find! Good case with a free $1500 bass thrown in.

If there really is a rattle then what about your original idea: remove the fretboard and glue in the rod, then reinstall the fretboard?

The waterslide part is simple: just download a Carvin logo and print your own.

Beej said:
Unfortunately, they can make noise even under tension. A while back I forgot to put a few blobs of silicone in the TR slot on a bass and it rattles, even while under tension. Actually it's more of an echo - hard to describe, but there can be an audible clunk/click when putting it down, or tapping on the instrument. You can hear it and also feel it.

I chased that sound for days until I went through the pic library of the build and realized I must have not put anything in the TR slot and that it was the TR moving in the slot. This is a shrink wrapped DADR TR so in theory should not be noisy. I think it happened because if you look at a TR from the side while under expansive tension, it forms sort of an oval shape (arced up/down in middle, but fixed on ends). Under tension in the slot, the middle has good contact along the slot with the top and bottom, but the butt end is "floating" in the slot and must be coming into contact with the top or bottom of the slot making the "clunk" sound. With a blob of silicone, this clunk would be prevented.

With a DASR design (like Bruce's), this whole thing would be entirely prevented. And hence that's the final straw for me and I'm working on using DASR rods exclusively once I can sort out how to make them happen with my preferred super thin neck design. :thumbsup:
Click to expand...

Interesting. I have put silicone glue on my only neck build to date, but that was mostly to keep it from moving around when not under tension. Good to know it will also keep it from rattling under tension too.
 
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#3,956
Jeff Siddall said:
remove the fretboard and glue in the rod, then reinstall the fretboard?
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That is option #1. Option #2 would be to rip off the body wings and build a new neck. Right now in my mind the front runner is option #3 which is more intense. These could be had with 5 piece necks. I could rip out the center of the neck through to rid myself of the bore holes and maybe just miss the logo and glue it up with a new 3 pc laminate and it would mimic what was available as an option. It would be a more stable neck with a better truss rod and I would have my choice of fretboards and maybe fretless if I so wish. Refinished and it would be as new.
 
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#3,958
Slidlow said:
That is option #1. Option #2 would be to rip off the body wings and build a new neck. Right now in my mind the front runner is option #3 which is more intense. These could be had with 5 piece necks. I could rip out the center of the neck through to rid myself of the bore holes and maybe just miss the logo and glue it up with a new 3 pc laminate and it would mimic what was available as an option. It would be a more stable neck with a better truss rod and I would have my choice of fretboards and maybe fretless if I so wish. Refinished and it would be as new.
Click to expand...

If you are up for the option 3 amount of work, it would be an amazing bass when you were done.

And yes, they did make 5 piece necks :smug:

Rear_Neck.jpg
 
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#3,959
Jeff Siddall said:
If you are up for the option 3 amount of work, it would be an amazing bass when you were done.

And yes, they did make 5 piece necks :smug:

View attachment 4459595
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Just need to find out what thickness the three center laminates were that they did. By photos looks to be about 7/8" total for the three which just eliminates the bore holes. On inspection of the Carvin branded tuners I found that they are Korean made. Jin-Ho I believe so they should be easy to replace. I will consider an upgrade if all turns out well. Works fine in passive mode and once I reconnected the battery wires it works in active as well. It is a really great sounding bass. I personally don't like the neck profile. While thin as mine it's more "D" shaped and not rounded as I do mine. Not sure if I will change that. At the moment the truss rod seems to be functional so I am at a loss as to what someone was thinking they were doing with the neck. The rest of the body is in near pristine shape so I can do a nice tung oil finish when al the wood work is done. I have a couple of others things to complete but I will start a thread when I get to this. I can only date this between 1999 and 2005 looking at the Carvin Museum info.
 
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