The Guitar Weasel

So ... shot the face of the neck level and smooth with my trusty Stanley No 4 plane. It's still thick as a tree-trunk but I will sort that after I've glued on the fingerboard. First time it's moved as a unit with the neck bolts in ... no nuts yet (oooer Missus) ... but the fit and neck socket were tight and tidy enough for me to lift the bass. Checking all is well with the bridge height ... and should be no issues. So in preparation for drilling the tuning box peg holes I disassembled the tuners and mounted them as a template. The holes are 14mm so I've had to order a bit specially ... bah! Couldn't resist a quick shot of her looking a bit more like a bass again - yep the cap heads of the neck bolts will be let in ... luckily with the same 14mm drill as needed for the tuner holes - happy day!

My regular daily work is in either building new pickups to customer's sometimes strange requirements - or restoring valuable PAF pickups etc from the 50s ... this stuff is like big Lego! Seriously though ... it's meant to encourage not 'put off' - I think any reasonably competent DIYer with some hand tools and who is willing to learn (there are lots of bits and bobs of knowledge available online) can do as well or better than I have here. Patience and an eye for the end goal are the most important things. I was born a bit stubborn ... that helps too ... man went to the moon when I was a kid, I refuse to believe I can't fix a musical instrument that's essentially made of tree!

So this is where we are now - The neck joint is fully trimmed and VERY tight fitted - it's gone back to the correct depth leaving exactly 27.6mm of overstand as per the original. The underside of the fingerboard end to belly is also exactly like the original - this is testament to my grandfather and father's advice measure a job twice - have a cup of tea - then measure twice again - then have another cup of tea to think about if you are actually doing what you need to be doing: the four measure/two tea method (or coffee if that's yer bag). So the possible order of the the list of jobs still to do: 1. Scrape a small amount from the bass side of the neck heel face to correct the slight wonkiness of the original neck pocket that had the fingerboard way off centreline. 2. Bore the pilot holes in the neck heel out to 8mm and cut the wider area to sink in the cap head stainless bolts and washers. 3. Shoot the face of the neck with a sharp hand plane to prepare it for the fingerboard. There is a verrrrrrrrry slight back-bow ... but I will try to leave a bit of that in to pre stress the neck back a tad to resist string tension. 4. Glue the fingerboard to the neck - hot hide glue, properly warming the neck and fingerboard to extend the 'open time' - and I'll co-opt an assistant for that job as it has to be done fast and right! 5. I'm pretty set on an access hatch in the treble side cutaway - so that will be next probably. 6. Making the neck inner clamp plate - yep I'm going to try that method: a plate bored and tapped M8 and secured to the inside of the neck block 7. Fitting tuning machines to peg box and some much needed final neck shaping ... the replacement neck is like a tree trunk! Then technically speaking the neck can be bolted on, the end pin, wire and tailpiece installed, the bridge shaped and fitted, the nut fitted - the sound post re installed ... And if I want to I can whack a set of strings on there to see what I have! Yep I'm going to refinish her ... but I think it's worth putting the old girl back under tension for the first time in I believe over 40 years to make sure she doesn't go BANG before I spend a lot more time making her look beautiful!

So while I'm waiting for the neck bolts to arrive I might as well do a bit of tidying up. The bottom front edge of the bass had taken some nasty damage to the laminations - but all easily fixable. I sawed down some birch ply down to one lamination and let it in with hide glue and then scraped with a cabinet scraper. I'm not worried about small gaps and visibly repaired cracks - I'll mix some fine powder birch sawdust with glue and fill the cracks. Okay the finish is buggered in this area ... I could touch it in - but I'm leaning towards a full refinish. The end pin hole had been reamed out massively and was also at the wrong taper for the new endpin - it nearly fell into the bass! So I made and glued in a liner from thin mahogany stock And I'm using the incredibly slow method of bedding the endpin into the hole by double stick taping sandpaper around the pin ... it works well and is way cheaper than an end pin reamer - still got some to go! I've ordered an ebony saddle to replace this ... er ... 'wood' one 🙂

Neck fit is getting closer - this is all hand tools shaping so it can't be rushed. Looking a bit rasp-rough at the moment ... but lots more wood to come off still. One issue that has been highlighted is how bodged the previous neck re-glue was and how 'out' the original neck pocket was built. I wondered why the neck appeared to have been glued in without being fully seated in the pocket - in other words glued to the sides but not even touching in a lot of the bottom of the pocket. Well that would appear to have been a bodged attempt to face the neck properly down the centre line of the body. with the new neck properly seated and its mating face at exactly 90 degrees in all directions the neck and the fingerboard (strapped on with tape for the test) point way too far over to the bass side f hole. The whole neck pocket must be out of true with the centre line. The solution is to plane and use a cabinet scraper to deliberately take the back of the heel down on one side - thus pointing the neck/fingerboard once more along the centre line. For those into tools - the lion's share of the wood stock removal on this project has been done with the 'rip' side of a 250mm Japanese Ryoba hand saw. I really can't speak highly enough about how good these saws are. Maple is hard - and a bitch to hand saw - but not with one of these. The Ryoba cuts like a sharp breadknife through a fresh sourdough loaf ... so satisfying.

I did physics at school - but preferred chemistry - as you could lean to blow stuff up 😁 I discovered ping pong balls dissolved in nitric acid can be used to make make 'gun cotton' - it's amazing how long it took for my eyebrows to grow back even with all the hormones of a fifteen year old at the time.

That's a super elegant solution - and I may yet go for that (especially if I cut an access panel in the cutaway, as the only other way of getting it in would be via an F hole. If you don't mind me saying this - and it's a compliment - that's the sort of solution my father would have come up with - apprenticed in the REME and finally a Staff Sergeant instructor - before finishing his time (I think it was 21 years back then) and joining Westland on the Black Knight and Black Arrow rocket projects (and launching the Prospero satellite) - and moving on to British Hovercraft - before being made redundant and buying a hardware shop! The only issue I see is I'm not super convinced the heel block doesn't taper towards the bottom slightly ... of course that would mean that the drilling angle on the plate might not be exactly 90 degrees. I shall do a bit more measurement and find out. PS my grandad was an engineer too - my dad used to say he'd be surprised if lathe cutting lubricant didn't run in my veins. As it happens though I wound up as a feckless musician - though all that changed when I started my pickup manufacturing business fifteen years ago - now I design music electronics - so a bit light on the full on enginearing practise these days 🙂

The problem I have with threaded inserts is that a double bass neck is two or perhaps three times the weight of an electric bass neck, and even with low tension strings the pull on that neck is prodigious. In order to get a full and stable fixing on the 30mm thick heel block you would need close to 30mm of threaded insert - and they ain't common - and when you do see them they are intended for furniture and relatively softwood. The heel block is hardwood and some of the long fasteners appear to be fairly dubious alloy. Most of the pro conversions I've seen done seem to use M8 - so that's why I intended to go that route. I've used threaded inserts on guitar and electric bass before ... but this is a magnitude bigger enginearing. I'm deffo open to looking mind. 🙂

Started to shape the neck heel to the same size as the original - lots of rasp work needed. Huge amounts of maple biting the dust! I've drilled the neck bolt holes too ... well the 6mm pilot holes at least 🙂

That's fascinating ... interesting to see the single neck bolt too. My plan is two bolts - to my mind it makes it easier to shim the pocket securely if there is a need at a later date. I quite like that circular access panel - it looks way better than the square ones I've seen - and the neodymium button closing magnets are easy - I always have hundreds of those lying about the workshop - bears thinking about.

I was resisting sticking even low tack tape down the front of the bass to establish a centreline as the finish comes off on masking tape as easily as the finish comes off a Murphy Labs Les paul neck! And that's bloody easily. I could 'Chinagraph' pencil or wax marking crayon a centre line - but there are so many check lines that go all the way to the wood I'd probably be left with a permanent 'ghost line' - unless of course I strip the whole finish - sigh, that's looking more and more likely. But with a wayward floor to the neck pocket I will have to be a bit more proactive in lining stuff up, so I think the tape is the way to go. The plan is for the neck to be bolt on - and I'm already coming up with a jig to drill the neck bolt holes exactly in parallel with each other and with the neck. 130mm x M8 high tensile steel Allen key cap bolts (nickel or chrome plated if I can get them) with captive nuts inside the bass - these nuts have 'prongs' that are dragged into the wood when tightened and will be permanently fixed inside. I plan to mount the nuts on the cap bolts by way of a long rod (and some Blu Tack) through the end pin hole - probably with an auxiliary positioning arm through one of the F holes. Yes it's keyhole surgery (well F hole actually), but the alternative is to cut an access hatch - and I don't do bodges like that! Yes I could glue the neck joint - but I may well be doing some travelling, and a bolt on neck double bass is an attractive proposition. The cap bolts will be sunk into the neck heel so they won't be visible.

7.00am this morning - in the cool of the yard outside our Oil City workshop - I took off the extra unwanted neck heel - bringing the neck angle to 90 degrees. This was a bit of a 'brown trouser job' as a cock up here could ruin the whole neck. I am getting used to the Japanese saw ... it's very strange cutting on the draw stroke - but by the Lord Harry it razors through maple like soft wood! That's a huge slab of American oak everything is clamped to - somebody just fly-tipped down the road from my house a few weeks ago - amazing what some folks throw out! I got thing mostly bang on - with a bit of end grain No4 Stanley plane work which was pretty soon sorted. The only slight downer is that I now find out the base of the neck pocket itself is a tad out of true with the bass centre line - clearly their production tolerances were a bit iffy - so a little bit of extra plane work will be needed. The lower part of the heel also needs tapered down a lot ... but that's not so 'mission critical'.

So the neck pocket has gone from this: To this The shorter end to the left cheek of the neck socket is to allow for a piece of ply to be let in to repair the top. Looks a bit neater now

It's possible ... I may try some 99% acetone on an odd area to see if that gets it off.

With things progressing at a pace my mind is turning to the finish ... while the front doesn't look too bad in the pics the varnish on the back has split along the grain lines of the wood, and the external 'linings' all round the bass are mostly worn through the varnish to bare wood ... in fact to a point where in some areas one can collect a free splinter to an unwary finger. Re varnishing wouldn't be a huge deal - given the work I'm already doing - or even spraying a finish ... the big however is not knowing exactly what the existing finish is, stripping it will be a. difficult and b. a lottery. Alcohol seems to soften the finish as stands, so it could be some form of spirit varnish or even a nitro based lacquer. Sanding will be bloody difficult in the body cut-outs and I can't really see a power sander option for those areas. Chemical stripping with a dedicated paint stripper can attack glue so that's not really an option I fancy ... on the other hand ... ten years with a cork sanding block I'm also a bit wary of 🤣 Suggestions on a postcard please ...

First view of the neck offered up ... and yes there's a lot of that heel that needs to come off!!!

Yep I must get around to sorting those plugged screw holes properly - but it's my gigging bass 🙂 Anyway these are almost steampunk in their look, heavy and smooth operating. I have to say they look pretty much hand made. They are about £55 plus carriage on Aliexpress or there's an eBay seller with them for about eighty quid all up. Bear in mind they will add literally several pounds to your bass ... but I look at it this way ... if we worried about bulk and weight we'd be mandolin players!

Yep double bass necks are super short ... so unless you have a cutaway double bass ... it's thumb-over up the dusty end! Yep I was a bit amazed at the price of a nice ebony nut too!

And here are the the goodies 😃 The ebony has a couple of shiny spots from rubbing on the packaging, and needs a good oiling, but it's great quality. The neck needs it's gluing face with the fingerboard given a super light going over with a jointing plane as it's almost but not quite rough thicknessed/sawn. The bridge is okay for 'setting up' but is a bit thin and weedy for a rockabilly machine - still that's a simple fix. The tail-piece is actually carbon fibre, as is the end pin and assembly - a but modern for what I'm doing, but again, okay to set the bass up with. The machines are 'okay' and may get replaced down the line. The nut wasn't in the kit strangely ... but cot me £8.00 from a specialist double bass supplier. An issue I can see is that the ends pin hole has been reamed out about 1/8th inch oversize - so one job will be to make a liner from mahogany or similar to tighten that up. The neck heel is nearly twice as thick as it needs to be, and is designed for a bass without sloping 'shoulders' like my Stentor - so it has a neck set angle cut in. That can be sawn down to 90 degrees as this bass has the neck set angle baked into the body joint. My lunch hour today was devoted to cutting a new laminated mahogany filler strip (laminated using my new hide glue pot - more about that shortly) and cutting a maple neck joint cheek. This is a slow and careful process with lots of checking along the way. So it was like this ... All that crap was cleaned out and a mahogany filler and maple cheek fabricated Trial fit ... to be glued up tomorrow and the other side prepped - yummy .... So hide glue - why on earth have i never used it before????? It's so easy once you have a heated pot - it just sits there till you need it smelling faintly of doggy chews - thin it with hot water if it starts getting too thick - wop it on and clamp quickly - it's reversable, organic, sets up WAY hard and is proper innit. Warm both bits to be glued with a hair dryer if you want more clamping time ... I will never go back to Titebond I swear. More soon ...

Quite excited ... a big package arrived from China 8.00 this evening. ... neck, fingerboard, bridge, end spike, tuners, the whole lot to do the bass all in one. What was I expecting? Well £200 spent on the whole shebang - what was advertised as 'ebony fingerboard' and 'nice maple neck'. I was dubious. What did I get ... well amazingly ... a bloody great chunk of what appears to be rather nice ebony. Sure there are some slightly lighter streaks - but really, barely visible. The neck is indeed maple, and even has very faint flaming. Sure it's fairly roughly finished and needs a fair bit of sanding all over, but it's really not bad at all. They have left so much spare wood on the neck heel that it's going to be a fair old job trimming it all down accurately - but better too much than too little I suppose Photos tomorrow.

I tried 'bass tape' when I first started. Let me say firstly I'm an aggressive rockabilly/psychobilly slap player and also occasional eczema sufferer since childhood. Firstly the bass tape that I bought from http://www.doublebassfingertape.com/ seems to be identical to medical 'strapping tape' or 'zinc tape' you can buy for less than half the price from eBay/Amazon etc. It's super sticky (both the stuff from Basstape and the medical stuff) and if you have sensitive skin it's quite painful to remove. I also found it utterly ruined my slapping technique ... it was too slippery and I couldn't get a proper grip on the string with my finger pads. My own solution was two fold: firstly I went for Rotosound 4000 strings which have a fairly low tension - then I bumped the set. This gives me the softest and easiest action possible - and as I'm only ever amplified except for home practise - the lack of volume is actually a plus point. Then I simply let my fingers toughen up - I actually think the chemicals in tape 'glue' can be worse for skin conditions than just developing thicker skin naturally.

I second that 'this'

A challenge would be building a double bass from scratch ... someone has already done the hard work here 😁

Excellent 😁

Think of it as the smell of proper repairs - and it'll soon smell like Chanel No 5