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Why are there no completely solid/1-piece basses?

#43
No expert on the subject by any means but using CF to build out a unit construction piece like a bass would be comprised of multiple layers of fabric with the long fibers running in different directions to get the strength required. The outer layer might be one piece of fabric but think of it like the finish on a wood instrument, it’s cosmetic and hides the many different pieces that went into producing a unit construction consisting of neck and body.
 
#44
Big pieces of wood are expensive as already noted. And the bigger the piece the harder to find it defect free.

Laminates will always be stronger than solid wood, thanks to modern glues being actually stronger than wood.

That said it seems this would be the easiest way to build a bass with CNC.
Dirk
 
#46
T_Bone_TL said:
What's a typical bass blank width? 16" ? Speaking as a tree owner with a sawyer that does work for me, there are a lot of trees that would have zero such basses, but the ones that would have "any" would have quite a few. i.e. the 24" wide boards I have stacked are a stack of 12 planks cut at 2 inches (not 8/4 - it's a matter of not fudging for kerf/shrinkage) from a 24" square section after we sliced off the waney bits from a 30" (or so) log. So I'd expect 7 or 8 from any log that would have the 16" width, and you might get several such logs from a decent sized tree. And those are 8-16 foot logs, so several basses per plank, and more planks if you went more towards the typical 6/4 thickness more commonly used for basses.

But, grain orientation on the neck and potential neck movement - ugh.
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Yeah, but think of how you cut up those blanks. Let's say you've got a couple 16" x 48" x 2" blanks that came out of a tree. Sure you could carve two basses out of those blanks, but you could also get at least two sets of body wings (maybe more) out of one blank and four neck-through blanks out of the other. Economically it makes more sense to cut parts rather than whole basses because you're not wasting the wood you have to cut away to get from the edge of the blank to the edge of the neck.
 
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#47
Aristide guitars and basses are essentially one piece, though I suppose there's a metaphysical question of whether anything made of a composite material is "one" piece or a composite of many.

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#48
Back in the 70s the local lumber yard had 8/4 30" wide Honduran mahogany. I bought a section and made a couple of guitars and basses from the off cuts but I cut one solid one piece bass from the board. It was a pain to cut, shape etc and ended up no better then built up assemblies so it was the last I bothered to make.
 
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#51
I made a one piece bass guitar. It was my first build ever. I think it turned out pretty damn good. Rich time and sustain that lasts till you walk back to you bass a week later after striking a note jk but it is ridiculous. It's built out of a piece of koa that was about 100 years old. I will do another one eventually because I have another identical slab of KOA.
Check it out if you like on YouTube
"One piece bass guitar"
 
#53
1. The larger the piece of wood, the more people kept there is a fault (cosmetic, like knot, or structural, like warp or split).
2. It's a LOT cheaper to piece together scraps so everything is used.
3. Piecing together different grain is more structurally sound - same reason we use plywood.
 

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