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Winter Build-Off 2022: Bamboo EUB

I leave you guys alone for two minutes and you're deep-frying mice.

Slow progress here. Got my templates cut out, the edges sanded, and holes drilled for alignment to the neck and each other.
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Fought off the paper wasps who were apparently wintering my overhead radiant heater.
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After a heroic battle, I finally got the dull blades out of my planer without breaking anything. The blades are about half dull and half gooped up with what I suspect is the residue of the original finish on the bamboo. I may try to clean them later. With sharp blades, things went a lot faster and I've finally managed to get this stuff prepped to glue up. There's a fair bit of gluing to assemble all these relatively skinny planks into a lump big enough to carve a double bass neck from.
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And everything they say about how splintery bamboo is is absolutely true.
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Anyway, I'm now about where I should have been a month ago. But hey, it's better than sitting around watching TV.
 
I've just realized that it won't be possible to flatten the top surface of the neck, where the fingerboard will be glued, with a planer or hand plane because the scroll protrudes above that surface. I could cut off that part of the scroll flush with the top of the neck, then glue it back on afterwards. It's all glued up from pieces anyway, so one more glue line won't hurt anything. But I could also use it as an excuse to build a router planing jig, which will be useful for some other operations too.

So off to the Depot of Homes tomorrow to buy some MDF.

I also discovered that the 1/4-20 screw inserts I bought for the neck joint are actually a mix of 1/4-20 and some other size, maybe 1/4-28. They all came out of the same bin, but shame on me for not checking. So I'll pick up some more of them too.
 
This neck is about three times as wide as my router will reach or my cheap bandsaw will cut, so I'm making it in three sections to be partly shaped before gluing. And each section is twice as thick as the bamboo planks, so there has been a whole lot of gluing to get to this point. The two outer sections are now together and ready to have their faces skimmed flat. Pay no attention to the messy glue squeeze-out.
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Here I am gluing the bamboo heel to the maple spine of the centre section. The little bits of card are there to keep the heel centred to the spine, which I left considerably thicker for some reason that probably made sense at the time but currently escapes me. It will be planed flush before routing the profiles and gluing the three sections together.
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Building the router planing jig from scraps turned out to be a bad idea. Nothing was quite straight or flat to begin with, and the more I messed with it, the worse it got.

Here we are again with a new jig made from a fresh sheet of MDF and everything works much better. Hot glue to tack the pieces in place, masking tape to keep the hot glue from tearing away bits of the jig when removed. You can't see the opposite face, but I removed the glue squeeze out so it would sit flat. Rather than build a new sled for my router, I elected to use the top from my router table, which later turned out to be not such a great idea.
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I was surprised how easily the glue popped off the masking tape. Not sure if it's the cold or what. Probably just as well that I didn't test it ahead of time, because I wouldn't have trusted it. But it actually worked out fine for the two outside pieces.

The centre piece with the maple strip sitting proud of the bamboo wouldn't sit flat, so it needed a different solution. I might have been able to get away with shimming it level and then bridging the gap with glue, but I didn't really trust that. So instead, brass screws in waste areas, and washers underneath to shim it level. You can just about see some of the washers in the picture below. Setting up a bright light shining across the surface made it easy to see where I had and hadn't already been.
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The result was ... adequate. The marks were noticeable but sanded out easily. At the time I blamed this on my router - the fit between the motor and the base has become kind of sloppy over the years.
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Next each piece got two 1/4" holes for dowel pins that locate the routing templates and will eventually align the three pieces when glued together. One hole will be hidden in the heel, the other inside the scroll. Then a couple of 1" holes to start cutting out what will become the channel in the centre of the pegbox.

I wasn't at all sure my little old Black & Decker jigsaw would handle this cut. It's about 25mm / 1" thick, which is really pushing it. I was even less sure that it would cut anywhere near straight, so I cut well away from the line. But it worked surprisingly well. Not fast, but it did a pretty good job, all things considered.
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Then finally, off to the bandsaw, which was uneventful. Three slices of neck, reading for routing. You can see where I changed my mind about the position of the tooling hole in the heel. The one closer to the fingerboard was the original position, but it was right on a glue line, so I moved it down a bit.
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No routing pictures, but that is going not too badly. The bamboo does want to tear out a bit, so I'm going pretty slowly. It may be faster to back up a step and sand closer to the line before finishing on the router. The big surprise was discovering that the workpieces were rocking on the router table. Did I not plane them flat? Did they warp when I cut them out?

No, it turns out that the top of my router table is not flat. That probably also contributed to my less-than-perfect router planing result. I'm a bit confused what's going on, since I've never had a problem with it before. But it's a steel top, so it's not likely that it's warped since last I used it. I can't see that it's warped enough to affect this job so I won't worry about it for now, but I guess I'll be making a new table top in the future.