My first cut using my Bandsaw in nearly 7 years. The top headstock taper was first to be cut.

The next cut was the neck thickness, which is the longest cut on the neck and the heaviest load on the saw. It's the full thickness of the neck billet, cut across it's widest point and along the full length.

The end of the neck needs to be manually cut, so my trusty Japanese backsaw comes in really handy here. No effort and a crisp and clean cut. Love these Japanese back saws. So easy and such a nice finish to the cut.

The top of the headstock needed a lot of planing and scraping to smooth out the bandsaw marks.

The underside of the headstock was really bad, I think my feeding into the bandsaw was a little poor today.

OK, I've settled on my typical 6 string headstock...I just prefer it and it's a little smaller and less clumsy looking.

This is my old router, it's stil giving excellent service although the fence is in a bad way.

The end of the fillet

Next job is to re-mark the centre line and head stock. Mark out the truss rod and then rout it out. Easier said than done! I'm not going to bother with carbon rods in this bass. I'm not convinced the neck will need it with a 1" core of purple heart...it's a very stiff neck already. Although I have just found a great source in the USA who sells carbon fibre rods very cheaply...well, cheaper than Stewmac!

Here's a list of things I need to purchase to push this bass forwards:

6x Hipshot ultra-lite tuners in black

Hipshot A style 6 string bridge in black .750" / 19mm spacing

Bartolini 69 J1 Hum cancelling Jazz pickups

I've showed the truss rod in place and a gap can be seen clearly. This will need a fillet to take up that space or the truss rod will be loose and will probably rattle at certain frequencies. It could also effect the ability of the truss rod too.

The head stock profile was roughly cut on the bandsaw and will be neatened up later using a template and a router.

The 2 way truss rod is glued at the non adjusting end with a big lump of epoxy and a small dab under the adjusting surround.

The top fillet was then cut and sanded to a precise fit. This was then glued wood to wood only using PVA glue and clamped in place to dry over night. Once dry, I planed the fillet flat to the top surface of the neck. It was only then that I realised I'd used on the extended length truss rod, reserved for 35" scale bases. So my choice now is to continue as a 24 fret 34" bass, or make a 22 fret 35" scale bass. I think I'll stick to the 34" scale.

I'm not very happy about the truss rod access rout, that will need tidying up at a later date.

I have a number of fingerboards I could use for this bass, several Macassan striped ebony boards, a stunning tulip wood board. A santos rosewoob board which has an unusual honey colour. A really nice purple heart board, but I think I will use a wenge board I've had in stock. I think it will suit this bass' tonal charector and look nice.

Next, I'll need to start thinking about preparing the Wenge fingerboard. It'll need slotting and then gluing to the neck. Then I can taper the neck on either sides. Then I can finish the headstock and start carving the neck radius.

The pickups and bridge unit are on order, 3-4 weeks shipping from the states.

I left around 2mm over the line spare for the router to neated up later. Bandsaws don't give a good finish, they are only rough cuts. I have seen some nice clean cuts from top end saws with certain blades on them, but I need to cut thick stock too.

That's the truss rod cavity cut. I'm not very happy with the results, I'll need to put a fillet along the edge of the rod due to a slight miscalulation on my measuring.

This is the wenge board being thickened using a planer ticknesser. It's not an expensive machine, but one which I hardly use...but it literally saves hours and hours of effort. The piece of long maple is a sacrifcial piece to prevent snipe on the fingerboard. Every thicknesser causes snipe and running another longer board alongside it causes the snipe to occurr on the maple and not the wenge.

My prefered fret slotting saw of choice...a Japanese backsaw. It's a lot easier than a fret saw and produces a really clean cut. The fret slot cutting went really well and I'm very pleased with the results.

I measured the bridge markings on the body blank, this allowed me to work out the string width and thus the the neck width. I'm using a 19mm spacing, which is wide for a 6 string bass. It's the normal string spacing which is found on a 4 string. O then marked up the neck taper and cut it with a few mm spare on the band saw. It's under cut so I can neaten with a router and a template later.

From the off cuts, I trimmed them down and added the extra width to make up the head stock width. The wood matches and is already the right thickness.

The body needed some more shaving to make the playing experiance better. On this bass I chose to go quite deep with this cut out. The ovankol is very very heavy and any material I can take off will really help with the weight. This was cut using a rasp and a well prepared scraper. My plane just chipped in and sanding wasn't too effective either. It went well and I think it looks about right.

Because this is a new body design, I can't re-use many of my existing templates. So here I am cutting out the new control cavity template on my fret saw.

I measured the bridge markings on the body blank, this allowed me to work out the string width and thus the the neck width. I'm using a 19mm spacing, which is wide for a 6 string bass. It's the normal string spacing which is found on a 4 string. O then marked up the neck taper and cut it with a few mm spare on the band saw. It's under cut so I can neaten with a router and a template later.

The pickups and bridge arrived last week. But unfortunatly, the bridge which arrived was for a five string (not my mistake), although the right spacing. But more of a concearn was the Bartolini 69J pickups...they won't make the string width I'm after. Apparently, they can only just make a 16.5mm spacing...which is way too tight for this bass. So they have to go back and this bass will have to wait a little longer to get finished. I think the only choice I have for this bass are the very wide 141mm single coil pickups. Which will carry the tones I'm after but not necessarily the look. While I wait, I have a number of other projects I can be getting along with...

And the moral of this story is...make sure your router bits are new and fresh...and make sure the operator is as well. I has a routing disaster today. The shock caused the wenge to serperate from the maple on one side of the neck. The two new end pieces flew off and I have some material missing which will need working on to sort out.

I've started to carve the volute area where it meets to headstock. This is carefully done with rasps and carving chistles. It takes a long time and is a high calorie burn!

Here's the fillet glued in place. This piece of maple took a long time to bandsaw and sand to the right thickness and height.

Carbon rods are on order...I bought enough for three basses. It's nice to have some in stock.

The G clamps and clamping bars were removed and the fillet was planed flush to the top of the bass neck using my small block plane.

With my fresh new bandsaw blade, this is increadibly easy. It cuts as fast as I want to push the material through the blade.

A pair of headstock MDF templates

MDF routing template attached

The left side wenge seperated from the maple as a split along the glue line. I suspect that the wenge was quire oily and didn't take the glue very well. It needed to be opened up, re-glued and clamped. Hopefully, it won't slip too much. A new left side headstock extension was crafted and glued on.

Cutting radius curves isn't so good with this new blade, it's a rip blade and itsn't so good for curves.

Gluing them on is quite simple but slippage is the enemy here. The carbon rods arrive tomorrow, so I'll prepare the neck sides for routing.

The head stock is ready for routing, the two addons are planed flat.

The right side peice flew off and took a lot of the neck with it. Thankfully, it's not too deep and I can sand that out.

The new headstock additions went on well athough one of them has a noticable glue line. The headstock flattened well and it's coming along well.

The underside of the headstock is taking shape. The neck radius is progressing too

One very oversized fingerboard...Ready for marking up. It's so big, I could easily get an 8 string 36" scale out of it...let alone a 6 string 34 inch scale!

A very precise and squared plank of freshly planed wenge. The edges were hand planed with my no5 Plane...still sharp after 7 years!

Fully marked out and ready for slotting in my 34" slotting jig.

Essentially, it's a pair of rails either side of the fingerboard with a router base which has a 16" radius curve applied to the bottom.

After about 45mins of hard sanding, the fingerboard is approaching a finished state...not bad at all. Wenge is a very hard wood and it is very resistant to sanding. 60 Grit paper hardly touches it!

So...after a LOT of sanding...I have a slotted Wenge 16" radius fingerboard

I carefully marked the fingerboard taper and cut with my bandsaw. I cut over the line so I could trim to it later

I have a number of ultra wide fingerboards which need to be radiused over the next few years. On a guitar, this takes about 2 hours with a sanding blobk. With a 4" wide bass fingerboard....that will quadruple and the chance of sanding errors is huge. So I desided that it was time I made a simple radiusing jig for my router. It took a whole weekend to design, buy and build. It works well, although I still need about an hour's sanding to remove the roughness of the router bit.

The fingerboard Taper is roughly cut using a bandsaw and then plained smooth. The board is slightly oversized and will get neatened after the board is glued to the neck. The fret slots are a little too shallow for my fret wirem so I'll need to deepen them.

The neck needs some fop sanding to the gluing face and I need to fit a small fillet above the truss rod nut. This is a simple piece of maple, sanded and machined to fit snugly. Once the glue has fully cured, I'll sand this down on my linisher and get the top surface absolutly flat.

While this is drying, I can turn my attention to the body. The neck pocket will need cutting soon and the control cavity will need routing.#

Because this is a new body design, I'll need a new cavity template cutting. Curiously, this will take more time than the routing will...but it needs to be done and done well. The quality of the final routed hole will only be as good as the template which the router followed.

This starts life as a paper drawing, which is then cut out and drawn onto some MDF. This is then very carefully cut out on a scroll saw and neatened on a drum sander (or one fitted to a drill press).

Once made, a second template is routed using the original, so I can have a variation to the depth of the template to suit my choice of router bit and bearing.

Guitar body wood is really harsh on the router bits, so I remove as much as I dare using a large forsener bit in my drill press. This produces a lot of mess and turns most of the cavity into fluffy chippings.

Once most of the excess material is removed, I then attach the router tempate to the guitar body using double sided carpet tape and cut the first 5mm. This will serve as the outer lip for the cover to settle against.

I then use a different sized baring to shunt the template to a smaller hole. The hole in this case will be 6mm smaller on each edge than the previous cut. This cut goes down as far as I dare to take it into the control cavity.

Once done, the template is removed and the top surface of the body is cleaned. It's a nice cut and looks very professional. The walls of the cavity will eventually be covered in copper adhesive tape, but the neatness of the routing is always evident though the copper tape.

The neck pocket rout went well, but it's just a dry run, 1cm smaller than the neck width. I'm really happy with the results and I'm looking forwards to the final rout.

I need to order up the pickups, bridge and tuners soon. This bass will hit a wall in terms of it's progress until I do!

The parts have arrived and I'm thrilled! Time to mark out the parts on the body! It's going to be exciting seeing all the parts layed out on the bass!

Now that I have the bridge, I can work out the string spacing. This then allows me to work out the neck width. This will allow me to trim down the neck to a finished state. This will allow me to cut the neck pocket to the exact size.

Having the pickups will allow me to mark out their spacing accurately. Make a template and rout out the holes neatly. I can also make a bridge template if I need to lower it more, but for the moment I shouldn't need to.

Using the bridge dimensions, I calculated the neck width at the 24th fret. I then hand plained both sides down to match that dimension exactly. I was suprised to find that they weren't very square to the heel underside...now corrected and plained flat and true. Well...as flat and true as I can with hand tools and a sharp eye.

I then worked on the neck radius carving a lot...this takes a lot of time and effort. Each pass with my scrapers takes a 1/2 mm shave from the target area and it's a slow and laborious task...but one which needs to be done right. This neck profile is really starting to feel nice. It's easily the best neck profile to date!

I carefully re-sawed the fret slots to the right depth. This is to make up the losses from the radiusing. When I slotted the fingerboard, I was worried about going too deep and weakening the board. Now that it's radiused and glued...there's no such problems and I can take each slot down to the required depth for the fret wire tang.

Amazingly, there's not much to show in the photos. Which is country to the amount of wood shavings are on my workshop's floor!

I bought a clear perspex pickup template from Bestbassgear.com in the states. It's great and allows me to see where I'm putting the pickups...I think I'll do this more in the future. For $9 it was a no-brainer and saves me a few hours making one out of MDF myself. Routng the pickup holes went well. The neck pickup hole became a little looser than I'd like. it looks ok, but the bridge pickups is very clean and tight. It won't show...but I'll know it's there. It was caused by pushing the router too hard against the template, causing the router bearings to flex and strain. I keep meaning to buy a Dewalt or Trend router for the better build quality...my router is very faithful, but it was quite cheap!

I went deeper with these cavities than I wanted to. I only had one template follower router bit with the baring in the right spot, so I had to cut the hole quite deep to catch thare baring. Ideally, I would have waited for a better bit to arrive but I just couldn;t wait any longer. It's ok, I can add some foam spacers under them. But I need to remember to order a few new bits up...these are a little worn.

The neck pocket is a really simple task, get the neck how you want it...surround it with straight bits of wood...double sided sticky tape them down and use it as a routing template...Violla! Slow and gentle routing is needed...there's no room for mistakes here. It's GOT to be right first time.

After the router has done it's job with a template follower router bit, the corners need to be squared up. I did think about making the corners of the neck rounded to match...which would have looked very nice and professional...but I don't currently have a router table and that's the only accurate and safe way of doing that, except mayabe a sweet CAD CAM CNC. Which is a little outside of my budget at the moment.

The corners are neatened with a very sharp chistle and a flipping big hammer....somethings in life need a sharp edge and big wallop! The ovankol top is very hard to chistle, hence the large hammer. Wood like this needs a lot of force and a sharp edge.

The fit is very very good and I'm really pleased with it. The neck fits in there like a glove and there is no wobble at all.

The headstock tuner holes were drilled with a forsner bit in my drill press...which are just great. Really accurate and very clean...I love these bits for guitar work. Some tools are indespensible for guitar makking and my drill press is one of those. I loved watching all the different coloured chaff spinning out of each hole!

A block of MDF on the underside of the headstock helps reduce tearout. It's held in place by strong double sided sticky tape...it's a luthiers best friend. There's a little tear out on the underside, it's quite mild and it'll be hidden by the tuners. I just wished I'd been more careful. I'm still re-learning some of my old skills again. All in all...it's been a very successful day!

I drilled out the neck pocket holes with a pilot drill. I drilled using my drill press and I drilled using the pocket side up so that any break out would be on the underside. If I drilled the other way around, the breakout could spoil the flat surface.

I then used a counter sink bit on the underside just to widen the mouth of the holes a little. This gave the thicker drill bit a locator to centre on.

Once drilled, I then drilled through these holes with a wider drill bit to make the final sized hole. I fitted the neck into the pocket and drilled the holes in the neck.

Once dilled though, I used a Forsner bit to cut the larger flat bottomed holes into which the bolt on screws will butt against. I like these instead of the traditonal plate design. Although both do the same function and these indivdual units are more work. But they just look so nice! I chose gold ones which will look great against the ash body and black screws.

After all six holes have been drilled, a little patience is needed as I don't have any depth stop on my drill press, so the depth was judged by eye and not measured.

I then fitted the neck to the pocket, fitted the cups and slowly but carefully tightened the screws to securely fit the neck to the body.

The final result is very fetching and looks great. The body shape is best seen from the rear. From the front, the fingerboard and pickup routes detract from the purity of the design. It wa heavily influenced by Lakland, Wal and G&L. Even a little Rickky in the upper horn.

I'm thinking of using some ovankol as the cavity cover. It'll contrast nicely and look great against the ash.

The body design is a little tight for a battery box, so I might fit into the control cavity.

My next task is to fit the frets to the fingerboard.

The frets wouldn;t initially hammer in even with a heavy hammer...so something wasn't right. I haven't fretted a bass for a very long time...only two of my early basses were fretted and all the rest were fretless. So I looked at the fret slots and realised they were a little thinner than normal.

I used a japanese backsaw, which i've used on a numberof basses (all fretless), so i didn't realise how much thinner the blade was.

I widened the slots using my old gents saw which I bought specifically for fret slotting and then I used a V file to add a slight bevel to the inside of the fret slot. This allows the fret tang to locate the groove a bit easier.

This time the frets went in with a few firm taps...much more how I remember fretting! It's not supposed to be very hard, just a firm hammer.

I like to use a plastic fret hammer, it's got a tough ABS head on it, but it works great and doesn't mark the frets...which is nice!

There's a few frets with a few high spots, so I'll re-dress those in a few days once the fingerboard and frets have had a chance to settle a little.