A Chip Off The Old Block

The walnut sandwich body has now been cut down to size.

I had to resort to buying a jigsaw to do this job as I would have been there for a very long time otherwise. The jisaw leaves a reasonably clean edge, but the blade can bend so the edges are not square.

The photo shows how much was removed from the top left (where my arm would be sitting). Fortunately I am now quite happy with the new slimmed down shape and I prefer it to the original.

The next step is to cut out the holes in the body. The original design only had a cutout in the top part, but now to keep the guitar looking balanced, it is sporting holes in both upper and lower body halves. This is mostly done "just because I could", but also to keep the weight down a bit.

I didn't want to make a copy of an existing bass, but the more I looked and created at radical designs, the more I realised that a lot of the usual features are there for good reasons. The lower horn, for instance, needs to be cut away on the fboard side to allow access to upper frets (not that I get up there often...). The other side of the lower horn is shaped so that when playing the bass sitting down without a strap, it sits on my right leg and doesn't keep slipping away.

These large holes mean that there will be limited options when the time comes to fit volume controls, and the circuitry to animate the fboard will probably have to be located in the upper horn somewhere. No pain, no gain? Or fools rush in when all else are reading the newspaper?

Moving back to the neck, the trussrod fillet has been made from an offcut of the walnut. It has been shaped to complement the curve in the trussrod channel, and a groove cut in the top to allow it to fit snugly with the trussrod whilst giving more surface area for the glue that will be used to fix it in later.