GarethFlatlands

Here's a pic from Geddy Lee's Bass book. It's a 52 and the picture isn't great, but it looks like a very small radius to me.

Nice use of spirit levels there 😃 The sled looks nice and sturdy too. It's amazing the difference it makes. My old sled didn't feel flimsy at all but the results are poles apart.

I took a long break from this project just because the time and tedium involved in getting the body thickness down got to me, and the results weren't that good. Trying to avoid paying someone to flatten it for me on a machine, I bought 2 strips of right angled metal to make a sturdier jig, as per the one used by Slappindabass above. After drilling a couple of holes into each strip, I screwed them onto the legs of the original sled as I knew they were the same height. A rubbing of beeswax on the sled and and router base to keep everything moving smoothly, and I was ready to go.

One more set of many passes with the router planer bit on the new sled and we were down to around 45mm. Getting there! But how was the finish?

Compared to the picture in my previous post, much much less lumpy. There's still the occasional line (and we've uncovered an unfortunate knot in the wood) but it's all much less severe than the previous method, and should all sand out without too much hassle.

I got mine from an ebay seller with the catchy name of 'wen5764'. I was a bit sceptical but it turned up and was good quality.

19 hours ago, JBoman said:

Nah, the top looks way too nice to cover it.

Maybe something to the backside... hmmm

Maybe route out some chambers on the back, cover them in the same way as your electronics cavity and put a few tasteful f-holes on the front? It's what I'm considering for my build if the tulipwood body is still crazy heavy after it's been thicknessed and shaped.

So I've been a bit listless this week and haven't really made any progress. Not sure why, just a general feeling of "meh". I made myself go to the basement today and finish off the first pass, and.... it's not very even at all. Fortunately (or not depending on how you look at it) we're still at approx. 48mm rather than anywhere near the target of 40-42mm so plenty of time to sort out a better jig to utilise the router planer bit which has now arrived. I'm thinking of 2 angles pieces of rolled steel similar to the jig slappindabass posted above.

On 28/06/2020 at 17:01, songofthewind said:

Good work! That’s how I was going to do it, initially.

I got onto YouTube for ideas, and found the guy on Popular Woodworking, and his video Planing with a Router immensely helpful. I can’t post a link from this iPad, but it’s easy to find. The rig I made is based on his, but more agricultural.

That's a better jig than mine, no moving the blank around between cuts and you don't have to use a bit with a bearing. If I have any issues with my shelf solution, or I need to flatten anything in future then I'll make the jig from the video. The video is below if it helps anyone who stumbles across the thread. 

Still waiting to the planer bit to arrive, so no more progress made.

Nice build! What's the jabba neck pocket method? I'll be doing mine soon and it's the thing I'm most nervous of now the neck is done.

Literally the first time I routed using the fretboard template I bought, I misjudged the router bit depth and took a big chunk out of the template. You live and learn! I'm sure every builder has done it at some point to some degree.

Mobile double post...

I did one of his bass building courses last February, a fretless with a passive MM pickup. There's a build diary I'll grab a link to when I'm not on mobile!

At songofthewinds suggestion, I ordered a planer router bit which will hopefully arrive in the next few days. With the glue dried on the sled legs, I put it together and clamped it to my fold out workbench. I put my wooden workbench together myself, and frankly it's rubbish. I foresaw a lot of problems with trying to flatten on the body on a surface that was anything but flat, so went with clamping it to my fold out metal bench instead, which should be a much more even, stable surface. I also used my chopsaw to cut a wedge out of some scrap wood to stop the body slipping around while I was working.

But I couldn't leave it there could I? So I did about 8 passes with the trusty top bearing router bit, just to check the proof of concept was good, and took 2mm off in strips around 12mm wide. It will take a looong time with this router bit, but the bearing is super useful. Seeing as I need to take around a full cm off, 2mm at a time will be approximately 225 individual passes! The planer bit is around twice as wide as my current one, but has no bearing so I'll have to consider modifying the sled if I want to use it, or seeing it the guides to the router will solve the problem. I'll weigh the options up when it arrives and I can test it out.

What an amazing looking bass! The attention to detail is mind-blowing. I keep considering an active pre in the Shuker build I did last year and this has just tempted me further.

I bottomed out the top-bearing router bit today, flipped the body over and... it's so thick that the bottom-bearing bit isn't long enough to complete the job. So it looks like I'll have to do some thicknessing before I can go any further. I already have a flat sled that I use as a circular saw guide so I cut two legs 5.5cm tall with my chop saw to support that from opposite ends of the workbench. The body will then slide under the sled and I can make straight passes over it with my top-bearing router bit (which has done 90% of the routing work so far on this project). The legs will be screwed into the workbench for extra stability, so there are some scrap pieces of plywood glued to the sides for this purpose. You can see them in the picture, clamped to the legs while the glue dries.

Just for fun, I marked out a rough layout to try and picture how the whole thing will look when finished, but that was all I could do for today bar another coat of tru-oil on the neck. It was hard to picture what the end product might look like when the body arrived as 2 blocks of wood, but it's coming together slowly but surely.

3 hours ago, songofthewind said:

Nice work on the neck carve!

I’ve just thicknessed a blank using a 25mm diameter router planer bit. I screwed flat straight timber battens directly to the long sides of the blank to make a bearing sled (see my MaybeRay build thread).

The planer bit made short work of thicknessing the blank, so I heartily recommend acquiring one. 

Thanks, I was thinking of making a sled for the router to travel along with a top bearing bit to flatten the top/botton and take a couple of mm off per pass so sounds like I'm thinking along the right lines.

3 hours ago, Andyjr1515 said:

Nice carve!

Thanks! I quickly went from "carefully does it" to "must remove more material faster!". The tight curves were hard without a rounded file but I got there in the end.

Body is glued and rough cut, started routing it out with the template earlier but called it a day as the router had been going for a while on and off, and I didn't want to upset the neighbours any more than I already had done.

It's a 2 piece body, tulipwood e-bay special. 5cm thick so I'm wondering what the best way of reducing the thickness to more like 4cm is.

So I have made a fair bit of progress with the build BUT I didn't take many photos. Sorry!

Next step from the above point was to route a truss rod channel using a 6mm straight cut bit approx 9mm deep into the neck down the centre line. I used the guide that came with my router to keep it centred, and used a chisel to widen out a very small chunk of the channel as the rod was ever so slightly wider than 6mm where the adjustment nut was.

Once done, I glued on a roughly cut fretboard blank and clamped it before leaving it to dry overnight. Once dried, I used the neck as a guide to route the edges of the fretboard nice and flush. The blank was very thick and I'm still sanding it down using a radiused sanding block weeks later with several mm left to go. There's got to be an easier way, so once I figure it out, I'll update the thread. Suggestions welcome!

The headstock was thicknessed with multiple passes of a router using the same bit as you see in the picture above. Once done, I got to shaping the back of the neck. On the Shuker bass course, we used a roundover bit to take the majority of the material off before fine shaping with files and a saw rasp. In the absence of the correct bit, I went the tedious route and did the whole thing with just the saw rasp. It took a while and constant checking to make sure I was happy with the shape. It's quite a chunky neck compared to the average Jazz, I'd call it a phat C shape. But it feels fine to me! 

Shaping done, I sanded up through the grades, 80, 100, 120, 180, 240, then 320. After 320, I lightly wet the wood to raise the grain before a final sand with 400 grit paper. The stripes in the maple really started to pop at 180 grit. Once dry, I applied the first coat of Tru Oil and sanded it while still wet with 1000 grit paper to fill any small gaps. I then repeated this with subsequent coats, moving from 1000 grit up through 1200, 1500 and then 2000 before moving on to fine steel wool between each coat. I've lost count of how many coats have gone on there now, but I think we're up to 7? I'll do a few more and then finish it off with a matt furniture wax.

Looking OK!

6 hours ago, Thunderbird said:

Good stuff 

Slightly off topic but I am not a p bass fan but yours sounded fantastic especially when you used a pick great job 

I find them a bit too woolly sometimes but tried that one in the shop and bought it on the spot. I'm not sure if it's the aftermarket bridge, pickups or something else but it sounded great to me.

There was a lot of good stuff over the 90's for me, although I can't say I showed the decade at its finest with my choices here.

26 minutes ago, Doctor J said:

92 was released in 83 😉

And re-released in '92! A bit of a cheat I know, but it's a fun line and a reason to learn it in the correct key as I'd been playing it wrong for years.

1 minute ago, ezbass said:

Good fun and well played again. However, this time I only guessed 2 (90 & 96). This is probably down to my long held view that the 90s was where music went to die (certainly post 91 anyway), YMMV.

It was a struggle not to just do a full video of grunge and Roadrunner records metal as that was all I listened to in the 90's.

Monday again, so time for a just-about-competently-played bass line quiz from me. This time it's 1990 to 1999, same format as last time in that there's one line per year. You'll need good speakers for 1998! Answers at the end of the video, hope you enjoy it. There's going to be a break for a week or so after this as I'm doing a David Bowie specific quiz along the same lines for one of my bands social media pages (the Bowie covers band oddly enough), and it's a big job including more than a few parts I don't know.

1 hour ago, Oopsdabassist said:

I was happy I got 6 this time, 70's was def more my era but I really sucked on that video!!

It was a child of the 80's take on the 70's, and I don't think I did a great job in terms of playing on that video so don't be too hard on yourself!

People above have already got them all, but here's the complete list.

Beatles - Let It Be, Marvin Gaye - What's Going On?, Bowie - Suffragette City, Pink Floyd - Money, Herbie Hancock - Bring Down the Birds, Black Sabbath - Symptom of the Universe, Ramones - Blitzkrieg Bop, Iggy Pop - Lust for Life, Blondie - Heart of Glass and The Clash - Guns of Brixton!

19 minutes ago, ezbass said:

An easy one for me, BK's playing on that album is amazing. Great cover by @GarethFlatlands as BK's style isn't easy to replicate.

Thanks, my slap playing is bad (hence not bothering with the few notes of it on 1982), but the obvious song from that album kind of needs it. There wasn't really of a question of picking something from any other album for me so I went with that line as it's so fun to play.