alittlebitrobot

Aye, it's interesting all right. I can't imagine it's something any small luthier is going to try. Once you've routed it, set the truss rod in and glued the blank back together, every cut from then on needs to be in perfect longitudinal alignment with a channel that is now invisible.

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1413153886' post='2575405'] Ha! This is what I surmised, but obviously I type slower than you... [/quote] haha, MEANWHILE, I've been off googling and it seems that it's a G&L patent called the "bi-cut neck". http://www.glguitars.com/features/neck.asp

Any chance it's one piece of wood cut down the middle, channel routed, truss rod installed and then glued back together?

I can't believe you got that done so quick! It took me a couple of days with a heatgun to strip my '85 Spectrum GT.

[quote name='Dad3353' timestamp='1413036280' post='2574397'] I trust it's in new condition; spick and spam..? [/quote] You should see the neck on it. Total banana ritter.

Nice one! I shall be checking this thread hourly for updates. I had to cringe at that hand-painted headstock, though.. ouch.

couldn't help myself! [attachment=173326:old.jpg] Looks great, though! How does it sound?

Then: (photo from google, not my own) Now: [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/246086-dr-frankensteins-westone/page__view__findpost__p__2562958"]I have a process post in the Build Diaries sub.[/url]

[quote name='ras52' timestamp='1412613804' post='2570399'] Absolute nonsense. It was not an accident... Paul had stumbled upon the identity of JFK's real assassin and the plot to fake the moon landings. He was given a new identity by the CIA, for whom he worked faking vaccine research and coordinating the delivery of several tons of explosive to the World Trade Centre towers. [/quote] This is exactly the kind of conspiracy theory claptrap that the New World Order [i]want[/i] us to think to keep us from noticing that blah blah blah pyramids something something Area 51 etc etc the British Royal Family are lizard people and something to do with mind-control substances in the public water supply.

Very interesting build! That swimming pool rout for the guitar must help compensate for the extra body wood.

I just added some Bakithi.

Thanks very much! It was loads of fun.

haha "For parts or not working".. oh well. Interesting design concept, though. It reminds me of a fella here that turns old hurleys into guitars http://www.adverts.ie/search/user-600684/status_active/type_all

I have four. The first bass I owned, an acoustic 4 string, is bursting with sentimental value and is somewhat magical, so I'm keeping it. Then a fretted 6 and a fretless 4. ...but then I just made a short scale fretless 4 a couple of weeks ago. I want to make more guitars, but I don't actually need (or have space for) any more, so I don't really know what to do.

Not nearly enough. [url="http://www.jamiegalemusic.com/uploads/6/0/1/9/6019283/6805268.jpg?677"]The real Jupiter for comparison.[/url] There's such a fine line between stupid and clever.

Yeah, that's a pretty ugly bit of integration aesthetically and, like HowieBass says, it's just awkward ergonomically. Still, good on them for doing it in the first place.

Interesting project! I really like that finish. Good luck with the next neck.

Thank you! I've just been looking through your website. Great stuff!

I don't have photos of what happened next. I got thinking about refinishing and, being a painter, I had a bunch of oil paints in the house. I decided that oil paint is basically wood stain so I sanded the bass that I'd begun calling Westy back to the bare wood and rubbed in a sort of tomato soup colour I made with vermillion and burnt sienna. I also wanted to try this Tru-Oil that everybody goes on about, so I bought some..... and it is actually brilliant stuff. Certainly brilliant for beginners. Maybe the more experienced woodworkers think differently. Finally, I put on all the hardware and strung it up..... and the strings didn't actually sit in the nut. They just went from the string posts over the nut and on down to the bridge Ah well. I fixed it by screwing in a couple of string trees. One from the Westone and another from the pile of P bass bits I had, which ended up contributing much more to this project than I'd anticipated. Anyway, here it is. Small, ugly and weird, like its owner, but it was well worth doing. I learned so much and I can't wait to get started on my next one. [attachment=172662:derp1.jpg] [attachment=172663:derp2.jpg] beside my 34" scale SR506 [attachment=172645:29.jpg] I had some tapewound strings that I had had on my acoustic bass for a few years. Since I already have a 34" PJ fretless strung with roundwounds, I thought the nylons would just be another kind of sound to set this apart. Tuned up to pitch, they were a bit too tight for my liking so I have the whole thing tuned down two steps. Then the hard bit... playing something, anything, on an unlined 30" fretless neck when I've never even played a short scale bass before. OH boy. You should've been there. You'd have smashed it to bits. After a couple of days of noodling, I recorded this. I didn't have enough shielding (It was all second-hand shielding and some of it got unusably torn) so it hums a bit and my intonation is only just about acceptable if you're in a good mood. The short scale, flatwound, low-tension sound and feel reminded me of the videos of Bakithi playing the Kala Ubass so I sort of went that direction as I'm a fan of his and mad about mbaqanga groups like the Mahotella Queens. I thought something slidey might help give a better idea of the sound of it. Here you go. (sorry) [media]http://youtu.be/00wF5oEyckk[/media] AND I'M DONE! Thanks for reading if you made it this far

The story so far: [attachment=172635:19.jpg] rear body-shaping [attachment=172636:20.jpg] Then I slightly meandered from the principle of the thing and decided to make a cosmetic change. The blocks that I filled the original cavities with were a different wood with grain going a different direction, so I routed a couple of millimeters down and then filled the gaps with wood I sawed off the original body. [attachment=172637:21.jpg] Sanded flush and re-routed. Much better. [attachment=172638:22.jpg] Oil time! Tung. [attachment=172639:23.jpg] Left out in the garden in my 'drying tunnel'. A Draper folding workbench with a binliner stretched over. Keeps the rain off, let's the wind through the tunnel. [attachment=172640:24.jpg] Meanwhile, over at the neck: mirror finish on the rosewood, after a LOT of sanding through the grits up to 1500. Very pleasing. [attachment=172641:25.jpg] I thought about making a pickguard from wood but when I cut the shape out of paper and laid it on, I forgot all about wood and just knew it had to be a white p/g. [attachment=172642:26.jpg] So I cheated (again) and bought some material. A sheet of acrylic. I cut out the cavity of the other mystery P bass I've mentioned (weird to imagine cutting out a hole) and stuck it to the acrylic. Then I drilled through and used this cavity shape to guide me. [attachment=172643:27.jpg] I had to do that cut first because the alignment was critical. After that, I just cut out the neck and bridge bits to fit [attachment=172644:28.jpg]

Time to rough out the new body shape using saws, rasps, sanding discs, whatever I had [attachment=172632:16.jpg] Now that I could see it with the neck in its new position, there was obviously a gap formed by the old neck pocket. I wanted to see if I could add some wood there to bring the body closer to the neck and giving the impression that it was a 'real' singlecut. (I know it IS a singlecut, but I mean the ones you see where the body contacts the neck much further along) [attachment=172633:17.jpg] and then shaped it back flush with the body. You can also see further progression of the body shaping here [attachment=172634:18.jpg]

The neck in it's original position (34" scale) and placed on top at it's new position (30" scale). You can see the new body shape I drew on, and the pickups are from the same collection of bits of a P bass that I salvaged some rosewood from earlier. [attachment=172625:09.jpg] I wanted a side-mount jack. For this, I broke the rules and bought a telecaster style jack from eBay. [attachment=172626:10.jpg] and my system for making wood knobs. I had some old plastic ones that I epoxied into some oak. Then I ripped the shaft out of an old potentiometer so that I could mount the knob on a drill and use it as a lathe. The last photo is not-quite-done-yet photo, hence the inconsistent thickness. [attachment=172627:11.jpg] Then this arrived from China! Couldn't have done this without it. With it, I was able to use my Dremel as a router for the neck and pickup cavity. The Dremel really isn't meant for this kind of work so I did it in very, very shallow passes to rout the edges (having removed most of the internal stock with chisels and the drill) and then cleaned it all up at the end with the Dremel again. [attachment=172628:12.jpg] [attachment=172629:13.jpg] Neck pocket fit. Not bad.. [attachment=172630:14.jpg] Just checking the alignment of the new neck pocket with some gardening twine and the bridge in its original position. [attachment=172631:15.jpg]

Here's where my photos start. At this point, I'd already melted and scraped off the poly finish with a heat gun and a paint scraper. I filled the control cavity holes with paintbrush wood, and chiseled the edges off the inside of the pickup cavities so that I could slot in some wood. I decided I was going to make it a 30" scale fretless with a P pickup. The Westone pickups and electronics are way too good to waste on this shambles. I'm saving them for my next one. [attachment=172618:02.jpg] [attachment=172619:03.jpg] Chiseled and sanded the paintbrushes flush [attachment=172620:04.jpg] and glued in the wood blocks. [attachment=172621:05.jpg] I mentioned that we'd previously hacked the 4 in-line headstock into a 3+1, but it was a bit wonky so I squared the edges and shoved on a bit of extra wood (see part 2 of the brief) [attachment=172622:06.jpg] I have no pictures of this bit, but I steamed off the defretted fingerboard, planed off the radius and flipped it over so I could have an unblemished rosewood fingerboard. Then I glued it on [attachment=172623:07.jpg] but, as you can see, the usable portion of the fingerboard didn't cover the full neck so I took some scraps off another bit of a neck that I had and stuck them together, then onto this fingerboard I thought choosing a bit with an inlay would be a nice visual touch. I put some drops of superglue onto some rosewood dust to act as a gap filler. I wasn't expecting this to turn into a mini smoking volcano. Very odd. But it sanded down flat in the end. [attachment=172624:08.jpg]

Hello. I'm not sure if this is actually of interest here, but it might be amusing for people who actually know what they're doing. It's all totally finished now so it's not exactly a "build diary" but I'm going to post the photos I took along the way. Here's a (hopefully) brief summary of the whys and whats: I want to make a bass from scratch eventually but I thought a heavy renovation project would be a good learning experience. That turned out to be very true but being a renovation rather than a total build, it had a much higher chance of actually going the distance. To wit, the brief was as follows: 1. Finish it. Although I usually go by "if you're going to do it, do it right", I knew if I thought like that this time, I'd never let myself get past the first step, but: 2. If there's an opportunity to do something unnecessary that'll be educational, do it. 3. Use only what guitar parts I already own. Unfortunately, I was well on before I thought to document the process (as an educational tool for my next build) so I don't have a photo of the victim. It was a Westone Spectrum GT that my brother used to own for a few years. Then, he bought a Warwick and I had my Peavey so we decided to defret it for a laugh. We also turned the 4-in-a-row headstock into a 3+1. Then we moved away and got on with our lives and this poor Westone sat in our parents garage for a good ten years. I don't have a photo of our one, so thanks to Google & Sons for this helpful photo of a Spectrum GT in its prime [attachment=172617:01.jpg]

"[font="Arial"]I wanted it to look like a bass that had been heavily gigged and [b]survived the 50s[/b]"[/font] [font="Arial"]The Korean War?[/font]