Prostheta

Circles, as always. I think it was mentioned earlier on in either this thread or another related one about high gain pickups removing the influences of the body woods on the "sound" of the instrument. That much is a definite. Trees don't grow with the express intention of being instruments so a material being termed as a "tonewood" is completely ridiculous and misleading. We're not talking forced agriculture and the breeding of cows to produce more milk or "better" meat. Wood is wood, but good wood is better than reliance on something being termed a "tonewood". Solid reliable construction that makes the instrument a better system. Acoustic instruments are a totally different ballpark to electrics of course. The comment on transmission of energy within a system is pragmatic and realistic because it can be measured and isolated. The endpoints of the vibrating string length that induces a current in the tranducers are secured to a system which vibrates in sympathy, with various frequencies in that system being reinforced or attenuated (think "wolf" notes found in the same place on Fenders of the same period and design for example and the opposites, "dead" notes) which in turn affects those endpoints (bridge, nut, frets) and the overtones of the vibrating string. A perfect case in point is my Aria Pro II Integra which has a wolf note at the 8th fret on the E string, but none on the corresponding note on the 3rd fret of the A string. This is because those fretted notes have different endpoints and hence the system works differently. This is not a pickup issue, but one of the instrument's inherent flaws or as some would say, "character". Or tone.

Long time no see Brian. Want me to fix your account?

Not just the pop....that grain fill is top class!

No worries! I'll do my best. What scales were you planning on yourself? I'm just making the decision in my own head whether to relax my higher strings with a shorter scale or whether the fret angles will become too extreme because of that. I'd prefer to reinforce the lower end but compromises are always the name of the game. I'll likely just have to figure out a reasonable set of strings gauges to provide the flex I prefer in the high strings. Excuse my mind waffle here. None of this will affect the first bass however I am wondering whether to make it a four rather than a five. Whatever. The body specifics will be the same.

Congratulations. You have acquired yourself a great diamond in the rough.

It does, but not in the way most people are taught to think it does. I think Sapele is a fine wood as it is cheap and readily available. It makes finer instruments than those dropping out of the end of factories if chosen and worked well.

It has been quite a while since I last started a project. I've always wanted to build (or own...drool...) a Carl Thompson style scroll bass however I've hung off until now. The design for the bass was derived from a six-string bass Carl made featuring his fishtail string-through and the 3D scroll. My own modern twists on the design have been to incorporate compound scales, materials Carl does not use and also the sacrilegious....paint.... In actuality this project is two basses for various reasons which will no doubt become clearer as I document the build further. The first bass is a basic single-scale version closer to a Carl Thompson style "no frills" instrument where the woods are simple and plain and there are no complications across the instrument. Unlike Carl's no frills basses, this will be a set neck as opposed to a bolt-on. The final instrument is what I have already named the "Black Rainbow"; a passing nod to the famous "Rainbow Bass" Carl built for Les Claypool and a more than obvious statement on the bass being painted black. Hmm. The design for the Black Rainbow Night Rainbow was - as always - drawn up in CAD to plan out the geometry. The old sketch drawing: The intended specifics for the first instrument are: 35" scale Sapele body either Sapele or Birch set neck Wenge fingerboard EMG 40 size pickup, possibly a simple DC or a P5 (CAD plan is wrong) Hipshot "D" style bridge Rear brass string retention insert Stainless steel fretwire Since this is the proof of concept instrument the spec is being kept pretty bare. I considered resawing the body wood and chambering it slightly however the already svelte 35mm thickness will shave a significant amount of weight anyway. All of the bevelling will be done by hand except for perhaps the large consistent runs of 45° bevelling around the bottom of the body and around the forearm area. The second instrument (CAD plan being tweaked) is the same as the first but with the following specifics: 35"-36" scale Black Alder body Birch neck (depending on the results of the first instrument) with Wenge laminations Wenge fingerboard laminated with carbon fibre veneer Seymour Duncan SMB-5a Music Man pickup Seymour Duncan STC-3M4 pre-amp/EQ Custom milled and powder coated brass bridge Carbon fibre neck reinforcement, truss rod cover, cavity cover and jack football Hopefully I will get chance to get the body blank glued up tomorrow and bandsawn before the end of the week, letting it settle out for a few days. In the meantime I have plenty of pin router templates to be making....

We seem to be getting quite good at posting over each other Wez. I advocate recessing the bridge a little further if that is what it takes. I hate shimming or modifying a neck pocket. It just seems cheap and cheat-y.

prostheta knows more about the pickup design than me... but I do know its not quite like a widerange humbucker (which fender actually did do a bass version of, very very rare they are too). this has 2 full size coils, but only the pole pieces you can see, the WRHB has hidden poles going in from the bottom. someone can correct me if I am wrong but it effectively makes half of each coil on this design a ghost pickup. its like a P-bass pickup more than anything else wheras the WRHB has two fully active coils, just with hidden poles on half of each coil I wrote my last post just as you were writing your own, Wez! This is the pickup in a nutshell (or a CAD program, whichever is more appropriate): ...however this is the slug/mag configuration of the MB-1E pickup.

Looks like a nightmare from the feverish dream of Eddie Vom Halen. Care to peek a little under that pup cover, Wez? I am guessing it is a pair of half-loaded bobbins with steel slugs and a single bar mag between the two with a smaller metal "keeper" to link the two rows of poles? FWIW John, APII were good primarily in the Japanese Matsumoku era through to 1987. The name after that was just a name and it pays to know what is a "good era" APII and what is not....the name is a good indicator however after production moved from Japan the quality went down to boring vanilla churned out crap. My '87/88 IGB-50 was made with a mixture of holdover legacy Japanese parts (the same "quickhook" bridge on Wez' CSB) and non-MIJ stuff. As Wez knows, so many bits of mine say "MIJ" whilst the majority of evidence says "MIK". This CSB is a night and day difference really. How was the bridge set on this Wez? I think you might have mentioned this already but Aria seemed to have some issues with optimum saddle adjustment range....either the neck angle or the bridge recessing.

I am about to make a 35mm thick bass with Sapele and have considered chambering however I think the weight issue is only really important for people who play upright regularly (I play upside down of course) and even then a wide soft strap does wonders. I'll do some thinking about the whole chambering thing when I post about my project.

The logistics of making a one-piece instrument are a far greater challenge than a "mere" neck-through, that's for sure. You should convince the guy that he doesn't need the bottom half of the guitar, take the controls to the top and put the guitar through the table saw parallel to the bottom of the neck. That'll make any freaky finger access work.

Despite being a slightly different type of pickup, my next instrument on the table is an oiled bolt-on five-string bass with an AlNiCo SD Music Man pickup. The next instrument after that will be much the same instrument but compound scales, neck through body, custom brass hardware, the same SD pickup but painted. Perhaps those should be interesting comparatively, however I think there are so many differences that the difference as it ends up at the amp will be a combination of more factors than can be quantified.

I've deliberately avoided reading the rest of this thread and instead concentrated purely on the pre-amble. This experiment is fundamentally flawed on the basis that it does not truly isolate the one aspect under the microscope. Merely altering the "tonewood" (I think that is an imaginary term we all need to unlearn) does not acknowledge the other aspects of an instrument build which in my opinion have more bearing on the final product's playability and interaction with the vibrating string lengths secured on them. As an example, we all know that a good neck joint in a bolt-on can affect the sound so an MDF-bodied bolt-on instrument will have a weaker and floppier neck joint than a solid hardwood. The material is simply not designed for the forces that a neck will put upon it. Tonewood as a word is a meaningless and obfuscating term which was invented as a way of classifying material X as "excellent" in instruments in comparison to others, often leaving other being felt as being inferior ("insuperior"?) or lacking in qualities. Would anybody call White Oak a tonewood? Chestnut? Elm? It seems apparent to me that a wood gets called a tonewood depending on whether it is the wood du jour. Every wood has a range of characteristics which are far more important than whatever "tone" is meant to denote. In my opinion, considering every aspect of a build and how the individual material's characteristics lend their strengths (such as strength!) to the final product is far more important than pouring "tonewoods" into the BOM. This is not to say that certain materials do not lend characteristics to the "tonal quality" of the final instrument. They clearly do. Using specific materials to alter that characteristic of the final product is just part of the bigger picture. Reliance purely on tonewoods is the equivalent of becoming very good at painting just the eyes of the Mona Lisa but never learning to paint hands or appreciate the play of light on materials. We have quite clearly been misled into the wrong way of perceiving the woods and materials we use which in many ways can blind us to the wider disciplines in instrument making and stifle creativity. If all Les Paul style instruments were made with "Mahogany", Maple and Rosewood the world would become a very boring place.

That is just plain wrong. Stop it now. (I love it) One-piece instruments are in my humble opinion a little over-rated other than for the sheer appearance. As a system a neck-through instrument does 99.9% of the work a one-piece body will do and I think the only improvement that is it possible to make is a rear-loaded rod instead of a separate fingerboard. The whole "glued up pieces" thing holds little to no real weight other than in people's minds however a solid piece from tuner to string end mount (including fretboard and fretwork) is where it is at I think. In many ways this type of design suits open tunings, drone playing and big chords so it would be awesome to see a neck-through or a single-piece 12-string :-D That Walnut looks great. Flatter cuts of Walnut under a dark tint resemble Ziricote in many respects.

This is exactly what I was planning on doing also Peter. My intention is to fashion some device which can be used for blanks with straight and angled headstocks, plus catering for the extension of a set or through neck. Those obviously complicate the template puck bearing surface locations and workholding methods. Incidentally, I found a machine virtually identical to this in one of the shop's corner the other day: http://www.woodworki...er_Linisher.jpg ...in that respect it would make the task of radiusing fingerboards much easier so I could happily strike that "function" from the carving device. For those that don't know how these work, refer to these Japanese factory videos:

After a certain amount of coffee and thought today I decided that removal of the most stock in the least amount of time is of primary importance in neck manufacture, with fringe benefits such as making more than one neck at a time (Gibson's carved top duplicarver springs to mind) and closeness to the final shape being advantageous. This puck/template based approach is certainly a good one as it allows for asymmetrical profiling and easy setup. I think that with a bit of thought this could also be extended to radiusing fingerboards - even compound radii. Didn't a member on here make something along these lines? My initial idea about turning profiles is not a quick method (it can be if you like danger I guess) plus it always ends up with any cross-section along the profile being a circular arc. Not very flexible. Duplicarving is something I've wanted to try for a long while, even to the point of my having bought a bunch of pillow blocks etc. a few years back. For the moment I think this puck/swingarm idea sounds excellent, and there isn't a massive difference between it and most of the swingarm radiusing jigs luthiers are familiar with anyway. Thanks all! PS. Were Travis Bean necks profiled more like conical sections? Sounds pretty chunky and un-ergonomic if so for the reasons mentioned. Still....short of CNC this makes sense given the amount of metal needing to be removed.

I was playing around with the idea of a neck profile being more or less a section of the surface of a cone, or at least that shape would fall close to a final shape for subsequent finishing. Given the example of say a pair of 5-string bass necks, mounting a pair of blanks symmetrically to a central workholding "wedge" jig - tapered to create the conical section and neck thickness taper - it should be possible to rough in an approximation of a neck carve. So - any experienced turners on here? Despite the unwieldiness of a pair of scarfed neck blanks running around at speed this seems quite plausible. Short of a duplicarving setup or CNC creating "roughnecks" as Doug is doing, this would seem a relatively simple method of cutting in neck carves on a repetitive and reproducible basis. Incidentally, how have neck carves been done in a manufacturing setup over the years? I'd be interested in hearing how Fender used to carry this out before CNC since Leo is of course the father of manufactured instruments.

Me too :-D I have a lot going on in my head all the time (some part of my Aspergers no doubt) and it is borderline torture not being able to move forward and realise them. The important thing is that I can learn the wider subject of woodwork and manufacture and scale things up somewhat. For the tubes....elastic bands covering the ends I guess. I'll certainly feed more into this thread now I can consider moving forward with various projects.

Fixed. You should now have access to the PM system, Martin.

Oof. That is far too sexy! A white Explorer bass would make a great sister for this one I still need to refinish: The Punisher-ish theme works really well.

I try not to critique unless I understand the builder's overall intentions and direction better. Just getting a guitar past the finishing post and "enter-able" is impressive enough for what it is worth.

Yes, that is very true.

Although outside the scope of what I'm trying to achieve with this project, I think portable workbenches are a great project. I couldn't agree with Bob more however, the most important thing they need is stability which implies either sheer weight or size to create a lower centre of gravity. Unfortunately both of these complicate the portability aspect! Foldout legs (perhaps with extendible feet to stabilise in your personal wilderness) to increase the overall footprint sounds perfect. The option of popping a couple of concrete blocks when in position might help. Never really considered this or seen similar backyard projects, but it would certainly be interesting to see. Where's Drak when you need him? I have seen some great traditional workbenches with modern twists though. I would certainly love to make a Roubo from Beech once I have my own permanent space to house one in. Mmmm. I do have a thing about the old traditional arts.

Apologies for the board throwing a bit of a burp there and losing the poll. This has been repaired (fixed is not the correct choice of word of course). Previous votes have not been lost, thankfully.