Nearly Finished

The Battery Holder

I must admit that the battery holder is a bit of an afterthought. Now I have nowhere else left to put the batteries other than in the end, just above the throughneck. Still, I want to make it user friendly so I want a battery holder that requires no tools to open and allows changes to be quick and easy.



I toyed with the idea of springy clips but in the end I have gone for a disc with a flat cut into it. Access to the batteries is by rotating the disc (shown in the left hand side picture) so that the flat allows them to pass in and out of their slot. Turning the disc to virtually any other position stops them from falling out (right hand side picture). It is not particularly elegant but it is functional and allows me to leave the tools at home.

Pickup Lines

To mount the pickups (after I had removed all the wood from their fixing points) I cut some small plates from the same piece of copper bar that was used for the nut. The pickup holes had recesses cut into them with a chisel and holes were made to fasten the plates to the wood. The mounting holes for the pickups were threaded with an M3 tap so that M3x30mm mushroom headed bolts could be used.


Doing it this way I can remove the pickups and plates to give access to the volume pot if it ever needs attention. I just need to remember to put the pot in before the pickup when it is finally assembled.

The pickup plates in place. They have two fixings at the top and just the one at the bottom which allows room for the cable to escape into the volume control cavity.

What a good fit! - no doubt helped by the camera angle.

I fitted the pickups and put the strings on to check the clearance between them. I noticed that the bridge pickup was further away from the strings than the neck pickup (due to the neck angle) so I had to pack the pickup plates out by 2mm to get a more consistent gap.

I had a play on the bass (acoustically) and all seemed well, but the frets were still inclined to buzz and their lower edge was quite scratchy on my left hand. After 'playtime' all the hardware was removed in preparation for finishing.

Before I got onto the proper finishing job, I decided this was a good opportunity to restone the frets. Last time I was probably a bit too tentative, so this time I ground off a bit more until my trusty 12" steel ruler verified that all was flat. The frets were sanded and wire-wooled to get back to a civilised profile and the bottom edges carefully filed smooth.

Finishing

Moon Bass Alpha was already pretty well shaped so it was just a case of removing knocks and grubby fingermarks as well as ensuring that the padauk was all the same shade of red as it seems to dull down after a while. I went through the different grades of sandpaper (80, 150, 180, 320) which took 3 long hours.

Not that exciting, but a necessary hurdle to make it look as professional as possible. I don't want to get it out of the gig-bag only for a layman to instantly comment that it looks homemade. I am hoping they will fooled into thinking it is a rare custom beast...

Once the sanding was finished and the dust removed, I rubbed in a coat of Danish Oil. The picture shows the difference this makes as it really brings out the full character of the wood. The PVC look on the fboard is just to prevent the oil soaking into the wrong places.

The oil is allowed to dry overnight before it is rubbed down with 0000 grade wirewool. This is like wiping clouds over the surface - 0000 grade wirewool is sooooooo fine! The oil / wirewool was done three times over the course of a week and after the last wirewool session a layer of beeswax / carnauba wax was applied and buffed to a pleasant sheen. Nice.

Making Square Holes

To make the pickup holes the same size a template was created using MDF. The pickups are Bartolini M34 Soapbars - a matched bridge / neck pair. They measure 89mm by 39mm, with a radiussed corner. Ideally this needs to be replicated on the template.

The template was made on the small milling machine at work, using the XY table to give a shape with decent right angles. It was then fastened onto the guitar with double sided tape and the router fitted with a straight 'follower' bit to follow the outline without destroying the template.







Masking tape was used to mark the positions of the pickups. As the position affects the sound it seemed a good idea to place them as far apart as possible. Practical reasons prevent this distance from becoming too great. The bridge pickup could be mounted straight alongside the bridge, but the string movement at this point is quite small resulting in a weedy output. The front pickup could butt upto the end of the fboard, but my occasional ventures into slapping & popping use that area to get under the D & G strings. I would keep bashing my fingers on a pickup if it was sited there, so again it has to be moved back by a couple of inches to give me finger room.



The template was restuck to the other position and the second pickup hole was routed. It finished up a shade too tight to get the pickups in and had to be whittled with sandpaper and hand chisels to give a good fit.






A small oversight has caused the bridge pickup hole to enter both the rear control cavities. Apart from having to move the batteries elsewhere, the main problem is that the pickup fixing screws will have nothing to fasten to. Not that I could find woodscrews that long and thin anyway...



Before the pickups were routed, the guitar was strung to check that the truss rod worked, check the balance, but mostly because I just wanted to play it albeit acoustically. Fortunately the rod worked fine after a three-quarter turn to give just the right amount of neck relief, but I couldn't get the action down as low as I would like. I just ran out of bridge adjustment.



There is some neck angle (angle between the neck and body) but this was something that I found difficult to accurately calculate beforehand (I didn't know how thick the fboard was going to end up after all the shaping). The only thing for it at this stage was to recess the body by around 3mm so that when the bridge is fully wound down the strings will be practically bottomed out on the frets.






It is a scary proposition to get the router back out all over the front of MoonBassAlpha especially near the fboard and all those nice curves stand a chance of getting gouged by a power tool gone crazy, but it needed to be done. Spacer blocks were taped to the top of the body as the router needs a flat surface to work from.




3mm was removed from the wenge / padauk and part of the ash. It was then blended back to keep the general shape. The top curve was able to be extended into the body more as it joins the top of the fboard. On the whole it looks remarkably similar to how it was beforehand (which is good) but now I will have the adjustment needed to set it up properly later on.



I just need to work out how to fix the bridge pickup without preventing one of the volume pots from being fitted or changed...

Shapely

The neck can be shaped now. More woodwork - more sawdust. It is amazing how many different places the stuff gets into!



The neck was roughly shaped with a round surform at each end before the spokeshave was introduced to it. I don't get chance to wield my spokeshave often so this was quite an opportunity. It was a job to be taken gently as gouging out a big lump of wood at this point would be rather annoying, so I removed small strips at a time in between smoothing the shape with coarse sandpaper. It has ended up with a 'D' shaped profile, with a larger radius in the middle, tightening towards the edges. The shape was blended into the headstock and onto the body at the other end until it seemed to belong together.









Once the neck was shaped & sanded to a smooth finish it was turned round and the frets were for a good sorting. After a scratch or two on the fboard I decided to put masking tape over the surface so that further work would not wreck any further. The frets were levelled with an oil stone block. It needed a fair bit of levelling as the fboard was a bit thin and wobbly once it was glued on to the rest of the neck.

I looked at getting some fret files, but they seemed stupidly pricey. I used needle files, sandpaper and finished off with wire wool. It doesn't look to bad, though I think in hindsight that the rough side of the oilstone was a bit too extreme.

The zero fret was bashed in just like the others. I had hoped that with the main frets being filed down, that the zero fret would be sufficiently proud (0.5mm ish) to do its job.

Oh. It was about the same as the rest. I thought the levelling had taken a lot more off, but I suppose to make a zero fret work properly it has to be taller fretwire. I pulled the fret out whilst pondering and then took the easy way out and sawed through the fboard at the zero fret position in preparation for a more conventional nut.

The next pic shows the newly cropped fboard and a sawn piece of copper bar that will become the nut. Why copper? I had some 6mm bar ready to hand.

The copper bar was used to mark a line on the headstock so that a groove could be made for it. I rumaged around and found a thin chisel (1/8") which was ideal. The bar was a good tight fit in the slot and then it was shaped to become nuch more 'nutly'. I carefully marked the centre point of the strings with a saw, but did not size them fully at this stage.

It looks a bit chunky and should be a good substitute for a zero fret. I don't like the idea of the nut being made out of a soft plastic as it may absorb some of the string vibration. It finishes off the the top of the fboard nicely - especially as there is no truss rod cover.






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