Phil Mailloux

If your pocket is nicely cut but just too large then you can just glue in a couple of layers of veneer on the sides until you get a tight fit. Next time try your router bit on scrap to see if it works properly. You'll get things like that once in a while with cheaper bits.

Thanks for the killa bass comments I have to say i'm getting pretty depressed, I thought it was in the sack already and then all those nice guitars pop up in the last day I'll be pretty anxious to see how the voting goes this month.

Well, here goes. This is my second build. This is a 6 string fretless bass specs are: bolt-on neck made of maple and purpleheart; fretboard made of maple, purpleheart and wenge; two home built jazz-bass pickups; purpleheart and olive pickup covers; body made of mahogany, ash, wenge venner, purpleheart and olive; gold hardware, gotoh tuners, wilkinson bridge; aguilar obp-1 preamp on a concentric pot (bass, treble) It was finished in may. I migrated to australia in the beginning of june and this bass finally arrived here this week. It was a very long wait for the shipping container You can see the build thread here. I'm also updating my website with a compressed version of this thread, it should be put within a week. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v104/phi...loux/jl3054.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v104/phi...loux/jl3032.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v104/phi...loux/jl3025.jpg

Wood definitely has the biggest influence on tone when we're talking about acoustic instruments, howerver, we're talking about electrics and the electronics do most of the job and the wood gives *some* tonal characteristics but not that much in my opinion. Let me give you an example: I recently built a 6 string fretless bass. The body woods are ash, mahogany, purpleheart, wenge and olive. The neck has maple, purpleheart and wenge. I hand built the pickups, two jazz-bass pups. Wanna know what it sounds like? Like a fretless Jazz bass. I was actually disapointed when I connected it passively (before I put my preamp in) because I was expecting a high-end tone and it turned out to sound just like a fender bass. Sure it's got *some* tonal differences than a fender J bass but that's what it sounds like. There's just no way you'll get a P bass sound out of it unless you put in P bass pickups. Just as much as you won't get a strat sound out of a Les Paul unless you stick 3 single coils in. No matter what wood you use. To make a long story short, my point in the original post was to forget about which wood you'll use for what tonal characteristics because in the end only the most picky players will ever hear the tiny differences in it and just build the damn guitar! I hope I didn't sound sarcastic or peed off because i'm not, just saying my point of view.

I did this marquetry fretboard a couple of months back but it wasn't anything too complicated, just straight lines. The different pieces of wood aren't inlayed in the fretboard. It is the fretboard. I glued it all with titebond and oiled the neck. There's also the option of epoxying or CA'ing your fretboard for a consistent feel/look You can see how I did it on that bass' progress page. http://projectguitar.ibforums.com/index.ph...859&hl=fretless

Dude, forget about the "sound" of whatever. What does that mean anyway, dark, smooth, smudgy, snappy, *insert other word* ect...? On electrics, the biggest part of your sound comes from your electronics, the wood acts as a filter I mention a bass cuz i'm a bass player/builder. Fact is bass builders like to play around with exotic woods and guitar builders prefer to stick with what's tradition. You can built with whatever wood you want. "If you build it, it will play"

Wenge and maple are both excellent neck woods, there's no reason why you shouldn't use it. Plenty of pro bass builders use Wenge for building necks.

Wenge and maple are both excellent neck woods, there's no reason why you shouldn't use it. Plenty of pro bass builders use Wenge for building necks.

Hey nice to see you here, Palmito Nah, i'm just here and at lutherie-amateur.com (for all you french speaking guitar builders here, hint, hint)

I agree with Mattia, THE most important tool is the router. I bought all my tools for less than 50 bucks each (or 50Euros) and most of them are doing great, except my router. I only built 2 basses with it and it's completely screwed to the point of being almost dangerous. My next big expense is a good router.

The musicman website mentions only "select hardwoods" obviously they don't really want you to know. Most clear finished Stingrays are ash, you'll also get alder ones and god knows what else under opaque ones. Check out the musicman forum on "the dudepit" if you want to find out more about Stingrays

go to www.reranch.com and download their finishing 101 and sunburst tutorials and read them until you know them by heart, then you can start bursting. You can probably buy a cheap chinese made compressor and spraygun from Bunnings or something like that but that'll still set you back 100$+ You can read about my first experience with finishing and sunbursting on my website in my signature if you want to see what you're in for.

Thanks for quoting my site If you've got more questions after reading those sites Malebolgia, send me a PM

I already built a bass with a MM humbucker in the same position. To solve the problem of placing it correctly this is what I did: I googled the net for a picture of a musicman bass standing up straight. I imported it and blew it up into CorelDraw then moved the image around so that the bridge would be at the 0.00 inches position on the ruler and the 12th fret at the 17 inch position on that ruler (for a 34inch scale of course) after that it's just a matter of reading the ruler to see where the pickup is placed.

Pots are usually 250K for bass (jazz & P-pickups). The volume should be a log pot and it's your choice for the tone, some use log(audio) others linear. 0.050uf and 0.100uf are the caps usually used in basses If you want to make a passive/active setup you'll be fine with whatever schematic that will come with your preamp, they usualy have many different versions with all the options available. The schems you can find online like at guitarelectronics.com are also perfect and all work well.

Looking good so far. Since you're using Duncan active pickups you'll need stereo because of the battery. One of the leads is conected to the stereo jacks which means that when the guitar cord is not inserted in the bass the battery won't make a connection to the active circuit and thus won't drain itself. If you had a passive circuit you would only need a mono jack. A normal bass truss rod is normally 24 inches long, since you neck is too small you might be better with an 18" guitar rod. It'll work fine. EDIT: I just reread your post. First calculate exactly how long your fingerboard is. If it's 25" or longer go with the bass rod if not with the guitar one. If you go with the bass rod don't forget to mark where the rod is in the heel of the neck so you don't screw your neck on the body later in the truss rod

The only two books I know are Jason Lollar's build your own pickup winder book (or something like that) and Erno Zwaan's Animal Magnetism for Musicians. Lollar's book is just a big Dummy/Idiot/Dumb Ass guide to build yourself a pickup winder with *some* theory. It's really not that great. Erno Zwaan's book uses engineer's jargon, is really annoying to read and the pickups are practically all homemade with spare parts. Don't expect to learn to make a strat or humbucker pickup there. I made the mistake to buy both books so learn from my experience and save your money! Google around for pickup building pages. SK's website and Fishbake's site are the best. The page on my site isn't a bad start too that's all the info you'll ever need to build pickups. For further *advanced* information than that hang out on the pickup maker's forum.

I've brought the cost down to 350€ for my basses. I save a few bucks by building my own pickups, that's less than 5€ per pickup. I won't pay more than 35€ for a bridge and 7€ per tuner (I use Kluson or Gotoh) and the wood comes from the friendly neighbourhood's wood yard.

For the first part of the question: Yes, if you want a 8k hum-cancelling pup you need to connect your two 4k coils in series. For the bridge coil you need 4.25k in series for 8.5k However, i'm really not sure that two coils will fit in a regular jazz pickup cover. I just had a look at the jazz pups I wound last week and i'm not too sure they'd fit under a cover if they were next to each other. I only wound about 5500 turns of 42AWG around each coil. You might waqnt to think about that, and if you do try make sure your coil is super flat at the ends. As for the second part of the question: I have no idea, I would assume that two humbucking jazz pups will act like any usual humbuckers, I don't think you'll get funky stuff out of them.

Awww shucks thanks Skibum. I'm really very happy with it. Olive wood by the way is damn rare to find. I was in the middle of olive tree land (meditterean part of France) and couldn't find it anywhere. I really got lucky. Cudbucket, it is a bit neck heavy but didn't plunge towards the floor at all when I strapped it in. It just felt heavier on my left shoulder. I was also pretty surprised how light it seemed to be. Gotta weight this thing

I put the bass together to make the final adjustments before I do the final sanding and the finishing. I'm quite happy with my work if I may say so and the back of the bass is on this picture.

You've pretty much seen all there is about the covers, the pics up there pretty much show all the steps. The only other part was finding the pieces of wood that would match well and give a nice touch to the covers once finished. I must've looked trough my scrap wood for 20 minutes just to find the two bit of Olive that would match for the two covers. I thought that the purpleheart bottom could be cool also since there's a couple of lines of purpleheart in the middle section of the body. I think it'll probably end up being even nicer once the finish is on the body. It should bring out the colors better. Here's another picture of those bits of wood glued together before they ended up becoming two pickup covers. The pickups themselves should sound like normal Jazz Bass pickups, but with two additional strings They'll also go through an onboard preamp. I expect this bass to sound KICK ASS when its done (actually I don't smoke...)

Erik, I will either epoxy the fretboard or CA it. I'm not sure yet. And for today's update, as promised here's my pickup covers. First pic, I started by choosing leftovers woods from this project that would look nicely together and glued it. It looks like a mess on the photo but it'll get better Second pic, I routed the pockets freehand after measuring out everything. Third pic, I attached a straight piece of wood to the top of the "pickup cover" material to rout the sides of the covers flush. Here is the result. After that I handplaned this and shaped it with files and sandpaper

The cover woods are all leftovers from the bass itself, olive, purpleheart and wenge veneer, I should post the pics of the covers within a day or two. I don't have a counter. I count by head. i.e. I count the turns of the handle. Each turn of the handle gives 3.3 turns on the bobbin. Each time I reach 100 handle turns I make a mark on a piece of paper. Then it's just a matter of multiplying by 3.3 for the amount of turns that end up on the bobbin. So basically I see in advance how many turns it need then divide that by 3.3 and that gives me the handle turns I need. I also wind to resistance. I check the resistance of the coil with a multimeter a couple of times during the wind and stop when I reach the output that I want.

Thanks Chris