Andyjr1515

And while I'm pondering on the carve, the glue on the headstock plate may as well be setting. Don't panic, by the way - the two G clamps are clamping onto a katalox offcut caul, not the headstock plate itself

It's been a while since I did a mahogany neck - and I'd forgotten JUST how easily it carves. Thank goodness for the carbon rods! The spokeshave took around 30minutes to sharpen and about 7 minutes to get to the stage where I needed to stop using it lest I took too much off! Then onto the micro plane to get the rough carve of the volute and heel transition. This took a further 10 minutes: I don't use a handle on the micro-planes. I just wear gloves and sometimes use it on pull and sometimes on push, then for the join up of heel to nut I just lightly drag it along a bit like a gentle spokeshave. All the time, of course, I am going nowhere near the spine, which is already at final thickness. Another 15 minutes or so with cabinet scrapers and some basic sanding and it's at the stage to stop and assess the feel and look, both for the main part of the neck and also consider how deep to scoop at the body transition. I find it a lot easier to assess this in 'air bass' style to actually feel where it works and where it doesn't. As a number of you know, I'm a bit quirky in that actually finalise the neck scrape and finish once the bass is fully strung and playable. Anyway, this is how it is at the end of stage 1. I will now leave it a while and come back to it to work out where to carve, and how much to carve, next. But, in the meantime, it's definitely starting to look like a bass now :

So far - although there's always room for the 'whoopsie' - so good. In fact, my very last job before lunch break is sharpening the tools for the neck carve Having checked the position that many times until I was bored with it, the fretboard got glued: Note the useful squeeze-out covering the wretchedly hazardous carbon fibre cut faces While that was drying, I put an ebony demarcation veneer on the back of the headstock plate: And while THAT was drying, cut the rebate for the control panel cover, hiding all of the previous screwholes (the new cover will have magnetic catches) I managed to get a 4mm slice off an offcut of the katalox (my bottom-end Axminster bandsaw, though slow, is proving to be quite capable!), which will sand down to 3mm to sit flush: So, while this looks the same as before, the difference is the fretboard it is now firmly glued: ...and the headstock plate firmly demarcate-able : And the neck and heel and volute are ready to carve

Yes - the arbortech heads are very good. I have a friend who uses them for carving wood sculptures. I suppose that I've had and seen so many instances where 'one slip spells disaster' - routers are a prime example - I tend to favour the methods where you creep up on the final shape. Having discovered the joys of working with wood only in the last 5 years or so, it's also part of the enjoyment. Clearly, I can only do that because it's essentially a hobby and therefore my time isn't costed into the equation.

Yes - a grinder in my hands would probably take ALL the remaining years off my life I start with a spokeshave to just get rid of the corners, then move onto micro-planes and then onto cabinet scrapers. With mahogany, this is usually a surprisingly quick process but even with rock maple it's pretty quick. Often, sharpening the blades and re-burring the scrapers takes longer than the initial carve! Actually, the volute and heel transitions take me the longest because those are more dependant on the other factors of body shape and headstock shape.

It's beautiful, @Bridgehouse

I love neck carving. Best bit of a build...

Only if I get it wrong

Dank u wel And...back to the project While the neck was still flat and unencumbered by fretboards and headstock plates, I popped it on my router thicknessing rig - with the nut end packed up by 1mm - to get the spine of the neck at the right thickness to end up with a 22.5mm - 23.5mm thickness across the whole length - matching @eude 's favourite playing neck for this kind of bass. And so tomorrow is a big day - if all is well once I've checked and double checked and triple checked everything, the fretboard will get glued to the neck and the headstock plate may well get glued to the headstock!

Merci beaucoup! (Just getting all the non-english words I know out before the rest of the EU casts us out into the North Sea and stop talking to us!)

@eude and I had a discussion about the swifts logos. Yes, they could be the normal Mother of Pearl - but I floated whether it was worth me trying ebony for a change. We both decided that it could look really cool to have the coordinated contrast - and that, if it proved just too difficult, we could always revert to MoP. Was cutting the ebony easier than MoP? Actually no - MoP doesn't have grain so small features are never going to be 'cross grain' and snap (they do snap, but not that often). But, after 2-3 fails, I ended up with 3 that were good enough to scribe around before routing: Then mixed some katalox dust with epoxy to glue them and gap fill at the same time. Sanded and a quick coat of tru-oil gave me this: Well, I think that adds a certain je ne sais quoi, don't you?

I think the binding is going to work well. Once the fingerboard has been scraped and finished and the binding corner rounded off, it should look pretty integral and - more to the point - it should work well from a playing perspective. I think this may well become my preferred method: Next task will be to cut the pickup chambers but that will probably be at the weekend earliest

The katalox headstock halves are now thicknessed and joined. I will leave the overhang until it's ready to fit - overhangs are useful for clamping, etc! It will be tomorrow before I get to it, but for the swifts logo I'm going to try something a little bit different. No matter if it ends up as a fail - it will be fully reversible My plan is to get this and the fretboard fitted and the neck carve started before the weekend...then I reckon we are getting close to the 'final furlong' Fingers crossed.

Yes - I'm afraid so. Mind you, it's a clone, bar some small tweaks, of @Len_derby 's so hopefully you'll be able to see that one

Excellent job! You are really motoring at the moment

For plain binding, I would have given the top a slight chamfer to match the angle of the fret ends and glued it flush to the fret ends and then scraped the excess binding off the bottom of the fretboard. However, because I am using the feature stripes on the binding to give me the demarcation line, I had to do it the other way round. So I clamped the fretboard onto a flat board, then pressed the binding, also flat against the board, against the protruding fret ends. That gave me a line of indentations that I planed off, clamping my trusty block plane upside down in the bench vice and pulling the binding over the blade until it reached the marks: Quick chamfer on the top and then just added glue and clipped it into place under the fret-ends with the clamps to hold it tight. Once I've levelled and crowned the frets, I'll just run a single edged razor blade, scraper style, between each pair of frets to clean up any glue smears and to 'lose' the binding joint line. Don't know if that makes any sense....

And here we have the first side of binding being glued. I'm sure there was a little bit of advice about the number of clamps but I'm darned if I can remember it

For the fretting, I am going to try a different way of trying to avoid the possibility of scratchy fret-ends. It's going to be a bound fretboard but this time, I'm going to add the binding after finishing the fret ends. I must start a thread for us builders to compare how we do fret ends! It's not generally one of the greatest features of my builds! First, the frets were installed using my normal method of 'tiny bead of titebond, hammer in, clamp a radius block on top' method. The frets were tang nipped before fitting: Then I trimmed the edges to an overhang around the thickness of the binding: Next was filing down the fret ends on my levelling beam until they were about 0.5mm shorter than the binding and chamfering them. Then I rounded the fret ends with a diamond crowning file: So the theory - if I've got it right - is that the fret ends will not only already have the sharp edges removed but, once the binding is fitted, will be separated from the players hand by a touch under 0.5mm of (rolled, eventually) binding. It's different to the Gibson technique but hopefully will have a similar result:

Gosh - this build is on a whole different level. Amazing stuff!

Yup - I like that very much

@eude and I have opted for a bookmatched katalox headstock plate and a flurry of screaming AJR swifts. The plate will end up the same colour as the body once it's sanded and finished but this is broadly how it will look: This was also a good test of how well my little bandsaw can cut the katalox into a 2mm slice. Worked well which means that I can do the same for a contrasting katalox cover for the control chamber at the back (with magnets for easy access). I have an offcut of katalox which is JUST big enough (phew!)

Lovely

These are the ones on my recent acoustic build. It is a mixed set of the new lightweight ones that Axesrus have had specially made for them. They are a nice design and work well. The previous build to the acoustic was for my sister-in-law and she wanted a black and gold mix so I had a set of gold and black spare parts left over which I thought may as well go into my 'bitsa' acoustic build

We're going for a passing nod of respect to the Carl Thompson headstock vibe: - which means two slivers of wings that will sit under a headstock plate. I'll do something along the lines of the recent acoustic build of a thin strip of the walnut central stripe and the outer wood outside that (in that case maple and in this case mahogany). And the wings mahogany / walnut sandwich is gluing as I type

Carbon rods in place and the truss-rod fitted: ...and a quick check it's all in the right place and at the correct angles! ...which happily it is. Sequence now is: headstock plate and wings; headstock profile shape; glue fretboard; thickness and carve neck. And, of course, still a lot to do beyond that!