gpcustomguitars

Routed the tenon pocket, fitted the tenon, and sawed off the neck taper. I've also managed to drill the hole for the jack. I should bind it now, and carve the top. Not to jinx it, but this went on very quick and I'm having a lot of fun! Scraped a spoonful of binding and poured it into some acetone yesterday, I've used pure acetone before, and would like to see the difference now.

Did some more work, my bearing swap worked really well, I got a nice binding ledge!

I was in the shop TWICE today Made the second wedge jig , and it worked nicely, so I sawed the tenon ends flush. Thanks Our Souls, I'm having lots of fun making this LP!

Now comes the more interesting stuff! Planed the neck angle of 4 deg to the top using the jig I made the other day, cleaned the neck blank some more, tapered the headstock thickness slightly and made the correct headstock sides transition. I'm about to make the other jig, for the pup plane angle, and hopefully plane it later today. Can't wait for the carving stage!!! Still don't know if I want the diamond or not...?

Cut out the rough headstock shape on the bandsaw, made some more progress on the neck angle jig, and sanded the headstock to shape.

Finally, some time at the shop...glued in a small piece to secure the rod with some CA, then cut the excess ona band saw, sanded flush and glued the faceplate on. In the meanwhile, routed an shelf around the body, about 1 inch wide, and made a prop for neck angle of 4 deg.

Some more pics! Cut out the truss rod channel, and rough cut access hole in the headstock veneer. I'll inlay the diamond and my symbol logo as on the "bass for a friend", probably plastic. I did that before and I liked the end result. I'm preparing to route the body top angles, check the tenon fit against the body and glue the neck parts together.

Had a few hours in the shop today, and I've shaped the tenon on the router, made the headstock plate, sanded back the headstock thickness for 2mm ( headstock plate thickness), routed the back of the headstock, and setup everything for routing the truss rod channel. I want to try to use the straight rod as in the old LP's, but chickened out, this one gets a hot rod. The bearing for 2mm binding thickness died on my Stew-Mac cutter, so I swapped the bearings on some router bits and came up with the 1.8mm one, we'll see how that works. Since it's taller than the Stew-Mac one, I won't have to do the cutaway area in steps.

I looked up the texas ebony, and it looks great! But wikipedia says it's not found in my part of the world... I'll take a pic of my log tommorow, perhaps someone will recognise it. Our Souls, thanks! What I have is the powdered black pigment for oil painting that I've used in the bass build, mixed with epoxy to inlay my logo. I might try to mix the powder with some mineral thinner, and soak the blank maple fingerboards to have it penetrate the wood. I would like it not to get lighter in colour with wear, but I'll test it on scrap and resaw to see how deep it goes. Cleaned the neck blank a bit...

No, I haven't tried this combo yet, so I'm pretty curious how will it sound. I'm hoping the holes will dampen some of the brightness off, and I'll definitely use your advice with 250k pots. Since I'll probably make a few of these, there'll be a lot of opportunity for experimenting - I plan to use different pickups in all of them, regular hums, mini hums, P90s (I just love them), and I would really like to try out those P90-shaped hums GFS carrries. I thought to connect the holes, but decided it would change the sound too much. I might try that on one of the others. Dying a maple fboard sounds good, could you tell me how does the dye hold up, does it leave color on the fingers? It would be great if you could describe your procedure and the dye used?

And yes, I tried to clean the shop a bit for the 2013

Time for a new project! Last year I have made some 5-6 body base blanks for LP's out of cherry, cut them out, and drilled some weight relief holes. Also, laminated a neck blank out of 3 cherry profiles I've cut out. The wood is not AAA, but I think I'll have lots of fun! I would like to make an LP out of one or two of those, and the goal is to refine my finishing and detail skills, try out some jigs, and to use as much of the domestic woods as possible. I'll have to use an rosewood fingerboard, since I still haven't found a dark sort of wood domestically. I have a log of some sort of walnut that has a purplish black core, about 15cm diameter, but it's still drying, and I have to get it resawn, so that will wait. Very plain local hard maple for the tops, almost no figure, but straight, quartersawn grain. For the headstock veneers I have some flooring to recycle that looks a lot like corina. I don't plan to follow the dimensions all the way, but to use the mix of various LP features that I like. Shapes will be the usual tho, no changes there. Here goes:

Great work! Could you post some closeups of the side markers?

Thanks a lot Curtisa!

Excellent!!! If it's OK, could you post or PM me a full name or a link to where to find one, I think my son would like it Btw, the tuning system is very inspiring, I might try something like that when I get the time - flattening a few screws and drilling some holes doesn't seem too much work, and should be fun!

Hi, This is an bass I built for a friend. Some specs: 34" scale 1-piece walnut root body, front radiused, back is lacquered, front is oil/wax bolt-on walnut neck with center lam of cherry, lacquered back, radiused headstock face - oil/wax rosewood fretboard, 12" radius, 22 frets, walnut markers, aluminum nut handmade dual action rod all the tiny bits handmade out of aluminum custom made bridge out of maple, ebony and aluminum volume + tone, GFS Music Man pickup, pasive copper shielding It has a great sound, will post some sound clips when I get them. The build is covered in http://projectguitar.ibforums.com/index.php?showtopic=46610

Thanks! Yes, the saddles are held in place just by friction and string pressure, which is enough, after setting the intonation I made small marks for him to be sure where to place them when he changes the strings. There are two screws from the bottom that can raise or lower each string, but I will probably make another set of saddles that I think I will like more, pretty simmillar to these, but with more flowing lines. Use boiled lineseed oil, at least I did, good quality thinner for oil finishes (mineral thinner) or turpentine, and you should find varnish in the same shop I think. Paint section of the home improvement stores should carry it. If you want to do it like I did, make sure to add 0.5 extra unit of thinner, because you won't be wasting much time waiting for it to cure. If I recall right, I have 6 coats of oil on it, one per day, and four coats of wax paste, 2 per day. This is a first time I've used this kind of finish, so it could perhaps be done better or differently, but I like the result which I got. The wood was sanded up to 800, and also between the coats of oil.

The customer got the guitar last night and he loved it! It sounds great, I have to say that the GFS MusicMan pup is really really good! He'll play it for a few days to let it settle, and then I'll do a final setup, lower the nut a bit etc etc... Dual action rod we had made locally works great too! An added bonus for me was that he's a great player, so it was really fun to hear it properly played. He is a great guy, so I had a good day yesterday. I'll add some photos and sounds when he sends me some... This is his band (I hope it's okay to post this? if not, I'll remove it):

Oil part is Lineseed-oil based varnish-mineral thinner 1:1:1, but I've added another 0.2 of varnish, and then another 0.5 of thinner afterwards to quicken the drying time, and the wax is 3:1 beeswax to mineral thinner. I did the headstock with the first mix, and it was drying slow, so I prefer more thin coats with quicker drying time.

..aaand DONE! Some more tweaking to do, but tonight it goes to it's new home! Some pics later! I have a better idea for the saddles now it's done, so I might swap them during the week, but that's optional.

Thanks! Finishing the saddles right now, hope to string it up during the weekend. Both wax and oil came out easier that I expected, I would recommend making your own to anyone interested in such finish.

The nut rough cut.

Great!

Leveled, recrowned and polished frets, oiled and polished the fretboard, too, currently making an aluminum nut. We had a lot of snow, and living in a middle of a forest is not of much help...I hope it will melt next week, I can't even get to the shop without a shovel. One car frozen, the other got stuck in snow for a while yesterday...