Karl Thompson

Yes, The volute on the back of the headstock/neck is to reinforce to reinforce the head. This is a pretty common feature on guitars and basses alike. mishaps... oh yes they were there. for instance when drilling the fretboard binding for the side dots, I drilled a hole at the eighth fret instead of the ninth. a bit unfortunate. Also after putting the first coat of finish on, I dropped the instrument which left a dent on the tail side. overall though there were much fewer mistakes than the last one.

thanks! Kudos to my parents for the shop... they are woodworkers in their spare time, my mom built our kitchen cabinets.

Thanks a lot guys! I am pretty happy with the way this bass plays, I have not fret buzz and the action is pretty low. I wanted to get it a bit lower but I guess building perfect necks and doing perfect fretwork comes only with experience. I would definately say, however, That this instrument is at least ten times better than the last one I built. As far as the sound of the bass, I could not ask for anything more. It is a bartolini preamp and it sounds just fabulous. Already I have had some people tell me that after hearing my bass they had to go... have some time to themselves. Idch- the handsawing was just to finish up the tablesaw resawing process. When resawing like this on a tablesaw it is safer to leave a little bit of wood between the pieces and handsaw that extra. regardless, I don't have a thickness sander Yes, the pickup cavities are bound with a .020" strip of black plastic and a .040"(?) strip of maple. I couldn't get the maple to bend around the corners of the cavity, so I used seperate pieces for each side and blended them together in the corners. The finish is a polymerized tung oil finish, each coat was hand-rubbed and buffed. The blemishes in the finish are from 2 mistakes: the first is that I accidentaly got a couple spots of sheilding paint on the face of the guitar while painting the pickup cavities. I had to sand those areas down, so they do not have as many coats of finish as the rest of the instrument. The other mistake I made was that the last coat of oil was not applied evenly. The last coat is a VERY thin coat and it is difficult to tell which areas have been finished and which areas haven't. So some areas ended up not getting that last coat The recessing for the knobs was done with a router, then the holes were rounded over by hand. Thanks very much for all the feedback guys!

My third instrument, a 5-string bass, is complete pics: http://www.ticon.net/~thompsons4/thor/index.html