Mediocre Polymath

Right, part three. Making the neck. So the first step in this part of the process was that the maple neck blank went up to my wife's workshop so she could bandsaw it out. Unfortunately, on that particular day one of my wife's students had messed up the set-up of the bandsaw in a novel and exciting way (undergraduates man, they have talents). This caused the blade to drift off track and irrepairably damage the wood around where the headstock would be. There is perhaps a parallel universe where this didn't happen, where the last piece left over from the maple board I bought back in 2016 was actually used to make my bass along with the last of the body wood. In that world I might have finished my bass, said "well that's that" and walked away from luthierie forever. In this timeline though, I had to buy another 2.4 metres of maple board, setting up the body-wood/neck-wood nacho cycle that will likely keep me making instruments for the forseeable future. (It's also not the last you'll hear of that ill-fated neck blank – there's a reason why my fretless bass is headless). Anyway, back to the actual process. After the correctly bandsawed neck came back from the shop, I set to work. First thing was to drill out the holes for the tuner pegs (using the janky-ass drill press from last time), followed by the truss rod channel. Because of my aforementioned beef with routers, I do my truss rod routs using an old-fashioned Stanley router plane. This really doesn't take very long (probably quicker than doing it with a router when you factor in making the jig, setting it up, sweeping up all the dust, etc.) and is good exercise. I wholeheartedly recommend router planes. They're great. After that I glued on the fingerboard using some little alignment pins though holes around a few fret slots and – as is tradition – every clamp in my postcode. The fingerboard on this bass is a pre-slotted one that I'd bought from StewMac a few years earlier. I generally cut fret slots myself, because it gives me more options when it comes to scale length and wood choice, but I was happy for the opportunity to skip that stage here. I then planed/rasped away the excess. You'll note that I've still not carved the neck; this is because I find all the other steps in the process easier to do with a flat-bottomed slab. With the fingerboard attached, I got out my slightly smaller plane again to properly level the glued fingerboard. It was pretty flat to begin with, but I didn't want any bumps to get introduced by the glueing and clamping. This also revealed the lovely colour of the wood. Here's the board after I'd added the dot-markers and sanded it with radius blocks. I'd originally intended for this bass to have blocks and binding, but I decided that this didn't really fit with the aesthetic. I also didn't feel like dealing with the hassle of cutting the recesses and the channel for the binding. Here's the neck after the fret installation (done with a big hammer and earplugs). I go through and shape the fret ends after I'ver finished carving the neck. With all that sorted, I got to shaping the slab neck using rasps and a spokeshave. You can see the neck from the OLP in the background here because I was measuring and comparing to get the dimensions and shape more or less the same. I don't have any gauges or guides for this part of the process; aside from the occasional check of the overall thickness I primarly work on feel. You know how I mentioned the router plane is good exercise? Well, it's nothing compared to this stage. I'm still not entirely sure whether Rock Maple is a wood-like rock or a rock-like wood. I don't know if you can really see the shape of the neck heel in this picture, but that's something I'm particularly proud of. I carve them to exactly follow the curve of join with the body, so they go straight to playable thickness with no Fender-style chunky section in front of the joint. Here's the finished neck, next to the old OLP neck it replaced. I was going to try and wrap up this trilogy here, but I once again find myself talking too much. It will have to be a Douglas-Adams-style trilogy in four parts.

Some people seem to be interested, so I'll continue. Though before I do, I think it would make more sense for me to quickly explain my general set-up. My guitars are mostly made at home, at a workbench in my garden (which periodically requires me to duck out of the rain holding an armful of tools). I have the option, however, of periodically taking stuff up to my wife's work so we can do things that require big, expensive tools like table saws, CNCs or routers. My wife is a scenic carpenter who runs a professional set-building shop with just about every tool you could possibly want. She's also a much better woodworker than me, it's handy. Anyway, back to the build. When I first started making guitars I bought a big ol' slab of ash, something like 2.4 m (8 ft) of the stuff, to make bodies with. I liked the way it looked, but it was very, very heavy and, by the time I came to start work on this bass, I'd already used most of it. I decided to use the remaining length of wood, cut into thin strips, to make a multi-piece body from contrasting woods (the other wood being sapele). I was inspired to do this by a picture of a bass made by a now-mostly-forgotten British luthier called Peter Cook, which I came across in Melvyn Hiscock's Make Your Own Electric Guitar years ago. Weirdly, when looking though my old reference images I realized that a bunch of them came from this very forum. So, er, thanks @FlatEric for providing those. If you read this, I thought you might be interested to see my Peter-Cook-Axis-inspired electric mandolin, which I made around the same time. The last section of ash board was cut down on the table saw in my wife's workshop, then I set to squaring it all up and levelling the sides with my trusty flea-market Record No. 7. This is the bass body with all its pieces squared up. It's not been glued in this picture, but I had already drilled the holes laterally through the centreblock for alignment dowels. I cut out the side pieces with a borrowed jigsaw, and did the remaining bits of the centreblock shaping by hand. I drilled those pilot holes for routing before I glued the body up, because my drill stand wouldn't reach when it was all joined together. And here's my hi-tech set up for carving out control cavities. Note the 1980s Bosch drill stand that my wife found at the back of the cupboard at work. I didn't take any pictures of the routing process, but here's the router template for the pickup routs and neck pocket. My wife was able to import my technical drawings to her workshop CNC, and I then brought the body up to the workshop to use the routers there. I should mention at this point that I really, really hate using routers. They scare the shit out of me. And here's the finished product. Pickups and neck pocket routed, as well as a recess for the control cavity cover on the back. The string-through holes and the neck mounting holes were done with the workshop pillar drill. All the shaping and rounding had been done at home with rasps and spokeshaves.

Hello folks, Paul the Plug suggested that people might be interested to see the two basses I've built over the last few years. I'll start with my four-string fretted bass, as that is the one I documented in more detail. I wasn't a member here back when I made it, but I figure I could post this in installments, like a conventional build diary. Partly to keep things in style and also so I don't have to write a shitload of stuff at once. So, where to begin? I think this all starts with my very first bass, which was a 2002 OLP MM-2. For those who don't remember, these were decent-enough licensed Musicman copies (Sterling back when the "Sterling" was a specific model not a brand) with passive electrics, basswood bodies and maple necks. This picture isn't mine, but it looked exactly like this. At some point around 2004 me and my brother drilled out the body and stuck a Kent Armstrong jazz pickup in at the neck. Later we (well, mostly him if I'm honest) replaced the stock pickup with a Bartolini MMC and crammed a NTBT preamp in there. The picture below shows my brother's sophisticated workshop set up (note the bracelets, because it was 2004 and we were cool). You would be amazed how clean a rout he was able to make freehand with a black and decker + blunt chisel combo. It sounded awesome but it never played particularly well, and that only got worse as I made various ham-fisted attempts at fixing it (attempts that saw most of the frets get filed away). In 2007, I bought a Yamaha BB604 and sent my OLP off on a years-long odyssey that saw it get passed around my social circle. (it only got more stupid stickers over time) Fast forward to 2017, when, after having made two electric mandolins and a guitar, I started giving some thought to making myself a bass. I remembered that my old OLP had a good 300 quids' worth of high quality electrics in it, so I retrieved it from the friend of a friend who had it gathering dust in their attic, poor thing. On getting it back, however, I was surprised to find that it sounded even better than I remembered it sounding. And while I procrastinated on the design of my new bass, I decided to refret it with some stainless wire that I'd bought by mistake for another project and not used. I remembered this as just a stop-gap thing, but looking back through my photos I realize that this frankenstiened, almost 20-year-old OLP – with its blank headstock, tinfoil shielding and its finish marred by the residue of removed stickers – was actually my main bass for like three years. I played quite a few gigs with this thing. Eventually though, I settled on this design, and started buying the wood I needed. Tune in next time for the actual build process (I'd intended to at least start that here, but I got carried away).

Hah, just a roundabout way of saying "my dad's bass". Both he and the bass are still going strong. He even still gigs with it, despite it being about the most uncomfortable and awkward bass ever made. Can't deny it looks cool though.

Thanks, I'll have to dig through the photos on my phone and see how well I documented those builds. I'm not great at taking pictures as I work. Also, I'm much happier hanging out with fellow old-timers than fielding the umpteenth question this week about whether or not you need a specific kind of bass to play [insert esoteric heavy metal subgenre here], which is 90 percent of bass conversations online.

Hello folks. Name's Ben. I've been playing since I was 16 or so, and I'm getting alarmingly close to 40 now. I have never been a touring or regularly gigging musician, though I have had periods of playing live fairly frequently and have been in many, many of those sorts of bands that rehearse for months and then fall apart without playing a gig because everyone's too busy. My formative bass influences were, as is probably pretty ordinary for my generation, Flea and Stuart Zender, with a bit of Matt Freeman and Mike Dirnt thrown in. More recent years have seen me gravitate towards the work of the old masters, studying the ways of Jamerson, Dunn and Rainey. I've always kept my stable of basses to no more than two – a fretted and a fretless, though the roster has changed a few times. The fretted list starts with the family heirloom Gibson EB-3 that I learned on, then an OLP Stingray copy (see the note about Flea), a Yamaha BB604, a Squier VM Jazz, and finally a thing I made myself. My fretless basses have been a mysterious 1980s Yamaha I got from a pawnbroker, a Warwick Corvette, and finally another weird headless custom of my own design. My amps have been many and various, but these days I rock a Markbass head and a stupidly heavy 1x10 cab I made myself. My effects consist of the traditional bass player tuner>compressor>overdrive. In addition to electric bass, I also have an upright bass (that I got for free and can't really play very well), various guitars, a banjo and a mandolin (which I think of as a tiny bass strung backwards). I'm at the stage of life where old bandmates from days of yore are getting bored with parenting, and deciding that maybe they want to get a band together and play Steely Dan covers in the pub. Which means I'm starting to get called on again.