Wademeister

I guess I got em pretty much finished up. Been playing them and they both sound and feel great! The one with the chrome hardware and witch hat knobs is the super lightweight at only 6.53 pounds. I was trying to not get too heavy but that was a little overboard. The fact that the mahogany board I found was super light really helped, but with the maple and bloodwood neck the bass is very resonant and has great sustain in spite of the light weight. The cherry one is also pretty light at 7.37. I'm really happy with these guys!!

Just me thinking, but I think you're way over-thinking this. Yeah, the B string is a whole bunch thicker than the G but if you're setting the spacing from string edge to string edge you're doing it by looks instead of feel. When you fret a string, you're pushing on the center of it and the center of it will contact the fret no matter what size string. Distance between them doesn't matter unless they're generally too close or far for comfort while plucking or picking. I don't know about all bass bridges, but I like the Hipshot A style and that one allows for string spacing adjustment so I assume many others do also. For reference, I'm very happy with my last two builds and the spacing is as follows: (4 String, BEAD tuning) Nut width 1.550 String spacing at nut (centered) .410 Neck width at 12th fret 2.240 String spacing at bridge .715 If you draw that out you'll see that I have a generous amount of room between the string and the edge of the neck. Having some extra room there does not making playing difficult or uncomfortable, but it does allow plenty of room for error and prevents accidentally pulling the strings off the side of the neck. I can't see a reason to minimize the neck width to the point where pulling the strings off would be a concern. Give it some room to breath, keep it simple and it will work perfectly well.

Looking good Madcow! Don't worry too much about having to sand your joints after planing, mine came out great and I don't even have a jointer. I just cut my pieces to size on the table saw and sanded them flat with round adhesive backed sanding discs stuck to the saw table. I used a bandsaw for the scarf joint and sanded the pieces flat by hand afterward. Probably would have been easier with a guide of some sort but I just sanded and checked the fit until it looked good. Also on that scarf joint I would suggest clamping your parts together dry and drilling a couple alignment pin holes through the excess wood on either side of where the nut will be. I had some 3/32" pin stock hanging around so I drilled 3/32" holes in mine. When you glue it up, the pins will not only put it back exactly where you had it, they will prevent things from sliding around when you clamp the glued joint. results:

You may also want to take a look at Luthier's Mercantile (google LMII). They have a great selection of fretwire including stainless and the gold "EVO" wire which I used on the bass I just finished up and I think that stuff is great. I like stainless strings and they can feel sort of grabby on the stainless frets but the evo frets are slick as can be. I also liked working with the evo wire. Where the stainless is very tough and wears tools quickly the evo seems to cut better and seems somewhat crunchy and may even have a harder surface than the stainless. I like LMII's trussrods better too, at least for bass. I have an Allparts rod left over from my last project that I didn't use because the LMII rod looked a bit nicer. Sorry, I don't remember specifically WHAT made it look better. Maybe it measured a little smaller or the welds were cleaner or something.

I've never played a flat board 5 string but I had a 4 built by Cliff Bordwell with a flat board that was simply great. I would think you'll probably be happy with the flat board. As for playing chords, I don't do that on bass either but it works just fine on the classical guitar so that's not out of the question. Don't be intimidated by the frets, put them in if you're not very sure you want a fretless bass. I built my first bass as a fretless because it was simpler and I regret it. The thing sounds wonderful but I don't really do the fretless thing so it barely gets played. Do yourself a favor and put in the extra effort to build the bass you really want.

You got it plinky, she's a '65. Only car I have too! Got tired of driving Hyundais and Mazdas and got me a real old school rockin' machine.

WELL!!! Some progress again at last. I've been distracted working on a different kind of project for a while now, check it out.. Meanwhile, I had someone take care of the finishing for me. I wasn't doing such a hot job with that and it was sort of bringing me to a stalling point in the project. Since I gave the basses to the guy I've not been too interested in the whole project to be honest. Maybe I just needed a diversion for a while but I'm back on the bass project now. I cut the frets by CNC machine as you might expect. Drew them into my bass CAD file and went according to plan. I think they came out looking great and the lengths worked out as well as I could hope for, extending just barely past the fretboard onto the binding. Feels terrific! Made a black delrin nut and glued it on with black epoxy so it looks great next to the black binding. Pretty much all I have left to do on this bass is solder up the electronics and make a cover for the control cavity. Here's how she looks right now

Coming from the bass guitar side of the house, I can tell you that a Rickenbacker 4003 is about 1.25" and the second bass I built was 1.20". Works great but it limited my pickup choices a bit.

I looked up some of your work. That's a lot of top notch stuff, you really have your act together. Looks like you usually do 22 frets and maybe sometimes 24? As for myself, I decided to go with a shorter/wider crown and bought 12 ft of the stuff so I'll have plenty for the pair I'm building even allowing for experiments and mistakes. Live and learn!

Well I was a bit miffed today as I was preparing to cut the frets for my bass project. I figured the lengths of them and added them up and was disappointed to find that I'll need about 56" for each bass and I bought the 4' pieces from LMII expecting that to be the right amount for a fret job. Obviously it was bad planning on my part to not check it before buying the wire, and a 24 fret (plus zero fret) jazz bass neck apparently takes a bit more wire than a standard guitar but not THAT much more... So I started measuring my USA Strat which is 22 frets and found that it would need about 50" if the frets were cut off about 1/8" over the finished lengths and the job was done without any mistakes. So that made me wonder if I'm just allowing too much for trimming or if 4 ft is actually not a nice length to start with. Seems like any guitar with more than 22 frets can't be done with a single 4' wire. Have any of you guys fretted your guitars with a single 4' piece of fretwire?

Most auto parts stores I've seen carry pinstripe tape in multiple widths. That stuff will bend however you want it to and it's pretty thin so your paint step will be minimal. Pretty much perfect for masking binding or faux binding.

NEE!

Sheeze! Only 3 entries but they're all so nice it's really hard to choose just one. Love the uniqueness of the 9 string and of course the workmanship looks fantastic throughout. I especially like how well the headstock fits with the rest of the design even though the odd number of tuners can make good headstock design a challenge. To my eye, everything fits perfectly right down to the inlay, pickups and even truss rod cover. Beautiful acoustic, which I haven't seen much of around here. Excellent workmanship again, but I think it was the binding that won my vote. It just looks so perfectly right to me. Also like the dragonfly on the headstock a lot. Awesome SG of course too. That ziricote looks amazing and works exceptionally well with the bocote and sapele IMO. Certainly looks like a winner in spite of any problems that may have popped up during the build. Great stuff all around!

Good stuff, really makes for a comfortable instrument IMO!

Looking good RAD, love that ziricote! I've been looking around and haven't seen where you mention the body thickness, how thick is your super-thin? The basses I'm building right now are 1.3" at the thickest point on the bodies and the one before is 1.2" so you could say I'm a fan of thin builds!