Winter Build Off 2022 - The Crook

Jeff Siddall · Jan 20, 2022

I tend to agree with other opinions here that the lavender really doesn't work. But I think that may not matter in the long run.

My experience has been that an oil finish, and time, will take purpleheart from vivid purple to more of a purpley-red brown. I think that could actually look quite good on your bass. Here is a before:

...and after a few coats of tung oil and about a year of elapsed time. I would say this pic is a reasonably colour-accurate representation:

However, if you really don't think you will like the naturally more brown variant of purpleheart, I would hit it with some stain. Even just black to darken it (I guess you would call that aubergineheart) would probably bring it into the right color spectrum for your bass.

Jeff Siddall · Jan 20, 2022

T_Bone_TL said:
Relax and let it age to perfection.

If you want to head straight to brown, hang it in the sunlight for a while.

That will probably eventually work, but whenever I leave purpleheart in the sun for a little while (like a few days) it actually gets an even more vivid purple color. That's the odd thing about purpleheart, the same piece of wood can change color significantly depending on its treatment.

Bottom line, it's probably worth experimenting on a piece of scrap to see what works.

T_Bone_TL · Jan 20, 2022

Takes more than a few days, true. Not the greatest pictures, but #69

Beej · Jan 20, 2022

dwizum said:
Really depends on what it's being paired with for me. I think it looks totally wrong on your bass. But it looks great next to maple or wenge for instance. On yours it just clashes with the body.

It's definitely clashing right now in a bright lavender.

I'm hoping that by the time it gets to aubergine that the colour will pick up more of the dark grain in the padauk. Hoping. :woot:

RichterScale said:
Was it just sanded?
Can you wipe it with mineral spirits and take another pic?

Pretty fresh in these, only a day or two. It starts off as an almost greyish lavender and then darkens little by little, eventually getting pinker (more magenta or fuschia), then dark pinkish-purple, then finally like a pinkish eggplant (aubergine) colour. But to get to that dark colour can take five years IME.

Reedt2000 said:
Can you bleach it? Stain it? Have @MPU wrap it in carbon fiber for you?

Bleach, stain and tinted poly all crossed my mind, but since purpleheart has so much UV change over it's lifetime, I might be fighting the inevitable, and the final colour IME is something I can live with.

T_Bone_TL said:
Relax and let it age to perfection.

If you want to head straight to brown, hang it in the sunlight for a while.

Gonna bring out my "people who ruin Black Cherry by covering it with red 'cherry' finish they could just as well have put on poplar and not ruined actual cherry with" PTSD if this continues on the path that's starting here.

Yep. My parents saved money on some of their less visible cabinetry by going with cherry-finished maple to match the rest of the real cherry cabinetry. 12 years later they all still look identical. Could have gone with all maple from the start and saved a pile of cash.

Jeff Siddall said:
I tend to agree with other opinions here that the lavender really doesn't work. But I think that may not matter in the long run.

My experience has been that an oil finish, and time, will take purpleheart from vivid purple to more of a purpley-red brown. I think that could actually look quite good on your bass. Here is a before:
View attachment 4550352

...and after a few coats of tung oil and about a year of elapsed time. I would say this pic is a reasonably colour-accurate representation:
View attachment 4550354

However, if you really don't think you will like the naturally more brown variant of purpleheart, I would hit it with some stain. Even just black to darken it (I guess you would call that aubergineheart) would probably bring it into the right color spectrum for your bass.

I like the naturally darkened colour a lot more than the freshly sanded stuff. I've had a small purpleheart box a friend made and after a decade or so it was a really nice brown colour with rose overtones. I'm going to have to hope for that I think. :thumbsup:

Beej · Jan 20, 2022

Slidlow said:
I'm with you , just too pinkish looking for my tastes. I'll add (again on a personal preference note) I'd knock off that scroll. I think your shape would be stellar with a slim upper horn.

I took your advice and drew several iterations of a non-scroll upper horn, but I think it loses some of the kitsch taking it off. Especially since the bass is already a bit of a goofy mess with the wood selection, the scroll horn seems to finish off the slightly campy feel. Kind of like a Wishbass or Carl Thompson. I know there will be some who will freak the eff out when they see me compare Wishbass to Carl Thompson, but to me the overall aesthetic is really similar, Carl is just a way better designer and woodworker than Wish.

Plus, have you seen what some of the Wishbass aficionados have done with them? :drool:

A non-scroll upper horn immediately became more elegant but the overall feel of the design seemed to drop a bit. Since I would not normally use a large scroll horn I'm still thinking I'll keep it and carve it a bit more. This bass is several things that I wouldn't do so I'm pushing myself (mostly emotionally) to try to get it into the best lumpy version of itself that it can be.

If nothing else, this will make a great conversation piece - so far everyone who's seen it in real life has been attracted to it's weirdness. :smug:

Beej · Jan 20, 2022

Huh. You know what I just realized? When I routed out the pickup cavity, the "purpleheart" stripes did not significantly change colour like purpleheart does when it's freshly machined. :eyebrow:

The grain pattern is right, and on the outside where they are aged, they really look like dark, old purpleheart that has just the right amount of redness and they matched the former fretboard colour before it was planed flat. Thoughts from the hive mind? What else could these strips be?

Pickup Rout

neck pocket

TerribleTim68 · Jan 20, 2022

Slidlow said:
This may be worth a shot.

Or a UV light if you're one of them fancy people who have one for curing resins.

Beej · Jan 20, 2022

Last comment before I got to work. Even though I've just ranted on PH, I still love @TerribleTim68 's bass. PH looks pretty darn good with wenge.

Slidlow · Jan 20, 2022

Beej said:
I took your advice and drew several iterations of a non-scroll upper horn, but I think it loses some of the kitsch taking it off. Especially since the bass is already a bit of a goofy mess with the wood selection, the scroll horn seems to finish off the slightly campy feel. Kind of like a Wishbass or Carl Thompson. I know there will be some who will freak the eff out when they see me compare Wishbass to Carl Thompson, but to me the overall aesthetic is really similar, Carl is just a way better designer and woodworker than Wish. Plus, have you seen what some of the Wishbass aficionados have done with them?

A non-scroll upper horn immediately became more elegant but the overall feel of the design seemed to drop a bit. Since I would not normally use a large scroll horn I'm still thinking I'll keep it and carve it a bit more. This bass is several things that I wouldn't do so I'm pushing myself (mostly emotionally) to try to get it into the best lumpy version of itself that it can be. If nothing else, this will make a great conversation piece - so far everyone who's seen it in real life has been attracted to it's weirdness.

Nothing wrong with what you got :thumbsup:

I'm just a sanctimonious scroll hater :woot:

!

RichterScale · Jan 20, 2022

Beej said:
I got to work.

Booooo

RichterScale · Jan 20, 2022

Beej said:
Last comment before I got to work. Even though I've just ranted on PH, I still love @TerribleTim68 's bass. PH looks pretty darn good with wenge.

Whenever I see PH, I'm fascinated by the fact that a natural piece of wood could be a color like that. I'm drawn to it and want to use it in some form. But when I try to imagine how/where I would use it in a bass, I draw a blank. Nothing in my head looks good.
Then I see it in someone else's bass and think, oh,...that's looks great!
Then I go back to the mental drawing board and it all looks like crap again.
It's weird.

Jeff Siddall · Jan 20, 2022

Beej said:
Huh. You know what I just realized? When I routed out the pickup cavity, the "purpleheart" stripes did not significantly change colour like purpleheart does when it's freshly machined. The grain pattern is right, and on the outside where they are aged, they really look like dark, old purpleheart that has just the right amount of redness and they matched the former fretboard colour before it was planed flat. Thoughts from the hive mind? What else could these strips be?

Pickup Rout

Beej

Jan 18, 2022

pickup cover winter build off 2022

Pickup Rout

Pickup Rout

Beej

Jan 18, 2022

pickup cover winter build off 2022

Pickup Rout

neck pocket

Beej

Jan 18, 2022

winter build off 2022

neck pocket

OTTOMH I would have said walnut (or nogal). Sometimes it has a purple-ish hue. But yeah, that doesn't look like freshly cut purpleheart to me.

Beej · Jan 21, 2022

Those stripes seem to change colour a little bit when machined, but I'm puzzled too. Looking at pictures and reading descriptions of nogal has me thinking it's possible. That said, I'm sure the rest of the woods came from one of our local specialty wood stores and they don't carry nogal, so I wonder. Anyway, it's in the right colour zone for both padauk and purpleheart. The dark purpleheart of the fretboard was around the same colour tone as the dark streaks in the padauk so that may work out alright after a decade of UV exposure.

Beej · Jan 21, 2022

I finished off the control cover by mounting it to the dummy positive template with double sided tape (too cold out for the "trick" to work reliably) and then routing around it with pattern bit.

control cover

This let me start the radius on the top of the body. After it was mostly routed in, I mounted the negative template to the body with clamps.

control cover & radius routing

And then routed it down to 5mm at it's deepest point. The control cover is 6mm thick at it's thinnest point, so this leaves it a bit proud in the deepest area and can be routed flush with the top.

control cover & radius routing

Then I stuck the cover on with a couple of drops of CA glue. It's a little proud here, but at inconsistent depths due to the radius top.

control cover & radius routing

Then I went over the whole thing with the radius routing fixture and made it flush with the top.

control cover & radius routing

After that I ramped up the neck area of the body to raise it up a little and did a little more radius routing. You can see in the pics above that the radius does not uniformly go from the tail to the neck. Lifting the neck area made this more consistent. However it appears I didn't take a pic.

Last note, there is a hole in the back of the body that I pushed a long hex key through to pop the cover off. That hole will be routed out when I mount the strat jack on the back. :thumbsup:

RichterScale · Jan 21, 2022

I really dig the body radius.
I'd like to use that at some point.

RichterScale · Jan 21, 2022

Do you still do a forearm bevel, or is there no need with the radius?

Beej · Jan 22, 2022

RichterScale said:
Do you still do a forearm bevel, or is there no need with the radius?

Yes and no, I've tried different radii and this one is 50", so it's pretty wide, and comfort dictates a bit of an arm bevel. The tightest one I have is I think 36 or 39" and it works well for an arm bevel, but it makes the edges of the body too thin if I'm also doing a convex radius on the upper half of the back too. The body ends up needing to be nearly 2" thick to do it nicely, or I have to radius the top only. I've come to really like the top and back radius together, plus overall I like bodies to be no more than 1.5" thick.

Also, I drew a carve line all around the body on my design and I'm going to try to make that happen. It includes some arm beveling.

Beej · Jan 22, 2022

So despite my chipper posts this morning, this happened within 10 seconds of me entering the shed.

good morning! How are you today?

making it pretty

I moved a clamp to put my coffee down and I bumped the body off the bench behind me. I didn't see how it happened, but jeez louise this thing is cursed.

It was a cleanish break, so I put it back in with CA glue and clamped it down to the bench while I drank my coffee.

fixing a hole

making it pretty

Not completely invisible but it will hopefully mostly sand away.

as good as I'm gonna get it

making it pretty

It went right through the body.

right through the body

making it pretty

Remember this little router blip? I also worked on it before routing the 3/8" deep 1/2" roundover on the top.

fixing a blip

making it pretty

Here I've routed the roundover in the top but not yet carved it. I've also rough sanded the top to 120 and the sides have had all the burn marks and router marks filed off.

edge routing and carving

making it pretty

Here's the body crack repair post sanding. Mostly disappeared, you can still see a little chip but it's out the camera's view in this shot.

what crack through the body?

making it pretty

And here's a pic of what the router blip's final repair looks like.

blip fixed

making it pretty

Now I have to do some housework and continue working on the shed itself.

ronknor · Jan 22, 2022

That has to be disappointing, but I can’t see any remnant of the break. Expertly done and a good save! Though I wish you much better luck tomorrow.

RichterScale · Jan 22, 2022

That sucks.
At this point of mine, I think I've spent as much time fixing mistakes as I have building.

Winter Build Off 2022 - The Crook

The Human CNC