Orange!

The neck is looking good so far - time to get some colour on the headstock and refinish the back. The back was easy once the sanding was completed. A layer of Danish oil, let it dry for a day and then apply a layer of wax. Once this is fully rubbed in it is impressively smooth.

The headstock was degreased and treated to 2 coats of grey primer from a spray can. Once dry (a few hours) this was gently rubbed down with the 2500 grit wet&dry before a coat of Ford Focus Electric Orange was applied. I had used this for the front panel of the valve amplifier and it is a great colour.

My wife Nicky had to break the sad news to me that my orange paint was in fact now gold. Perhaps it doesn't last for 18months in a cold wet garage. Maybe all the juicy orangey bits had gone mouldy? But the end result was not orange and therefore was not going to be staying. Another wander off to Halfords and I came back with a can of fluorescent orange paint. Even being *slightly* colourblind I knew I was on to a winner as it had orange written in big letters down the side. I also discovered spray glitter. I now knew what had to be done!

The previous gold was sanded back a little and 3 coats of the solid bright orange paint were added. Again, this was allowed to dry for a few hours before a light sand and a couple of glitter coats added before another 5 coats of clear lacquer were applied.

This was allowed to dry overnight before a further light sanding (to remove the bobbly finish from spray can painting) and then the T-cut was used to buff to a shine. Photos just don't do it justice. The paint is toooo bright for the ageing camera ;-)

Body Work

Now the neck is done apart from fitting a nut at some point, my attention turned to the body. I spent some time looking into hardwoods that combine a decent amount of strength and machinability and it boiled down to good ol' maple. I found a decent plank 2m x 22mm x 220mm at the local timber merchant for less than £20.

The tricky part of the body is the bottom section. This is mostly because there is no top section (see earlier sketch) and this has to take the full string tension whilst looking like a micrometer. I am going to use a stainless steel bolted sandwich style re-inforcing technique which I have mulled over with a few other engineers (thanks Robin / Chris)

To get the strengthening to fit together properly I'm going for a constant radius for the lower section. I borrowed a router (thanks again Chris!) and swapped the parallel fence for a pice of bent rod and this allowed me to cut out several semi-circles. There will be three glued together (with the steel in the middle one) eventually before it will be shaped to a round cross-section.

I need to draw out the shapes for the top horn and the pickup holding section too before I start getting the glue out in earnest. I can see this is not going to be a light guitar, but if it is rigid enough such that tuning one string doesn't mess up the other three then I'm happy!

Orange cocktail sticks!

The perspex fboard slots are looking fine, and the next job is to get a smooth radius across it. Fortunately I already had a small piece of ash left over from MoonBassAlpha that I used to check the neck radius (around 12" or so), so I was already ahead of the game. No substitute here for sandpaper and elbow grease. Give me a power tool and I could really mess things up badly, so its a case of getting the 60 grit paper out and 'aving a rub. Don't bother with abrasive paper from the cheap shops as the sand disappears at the first sign of action! Insert your own political comment here ;-)

It is the usual case of getting the shape roughly right with the 60, and then progressing through the grades (80, 120, 180, 240, 400, 600, 800, 1200, 2500) and then getting the metal polish/T-cut out to finish off. I couldn't believe that Halfords did 2500 grade paper - it's smoother than a smiling salesman covered in baby-oil. I expect.

Due to the neck widening near the heel, the constant radius causes more material to be lost at the edges there than at the head end. Because of this, the neck had to be put back on the slot cutting jig a second time so that from around the 8th slot onwards the grooves could be deepened. I suppose I should have realised this whilst cutting the slots originally, but I must have been getting hungry at the time ;-)

The frets were then pressed into the slots. Where I had recut the slots, they seemed a little wider as though the circular saw alignment was a bit adrift. A tube of superglue came to the rescue here, but on the whole, the acrylic was a good material to press frets into. None of them have fallen out yet which is the main thing.

The fboard was protected with masking tape and the frets were lightly levelled and dressed before being polished. The edges were chamfered a bit so I don't cut my pinkies.

At this stage I also sanded off the old black paint off the headstock, and the scratched lacquer off the back of the neck / head. This came up very nicely and it is starting to look like a new piece of neckery instead of a lump of old flea-bay. The visible ends of the frets were also treated to some white paint so that they do not stand out too much. I think it is safe to say this is cheating.

I then considered my options for neck dot inlays. I did not want to spoil the i-bass look from the front, so I just needed side markers. The perspex is a bit too thin at the heel end, so the markers are best placed in the carbon fibre section. I wanted to get hold of some orange plastic rod which could be cut into short lengths and would look great. Nobody I could find makes 2mm orange rod.

Whilst observing somebody in the pub with a complicated drink (ie not a pint), inspiration hit me in the form of plastic cocktail sticks. Not literally though. I scoured the local shops and online and realised that everyone is now using wooden cocktail sticks. What is up with the world? Why use environmentally friendly wood for culinary articles when cheap nasty plastic could have done the job in a much more tacky way? Plastic cocktail sticks must have gone the same way as the Kenwood sodastream, space hoppers and nylon slacks. Smeg!

The second choice was 2mm dia aluminium wire. I drilled 2mm holes in the carbon fibre (which was tougher than I thought) and then bashed the aluminium wire in, followed by some filing down and light sanding. Shiny. Quite nice and up-market looking. I still would have preferred cheap and trashy, but that's me...

F-board slot cutting

The fixture used on the Moon Bass was built around a flimsy mini-drill that had a flexible shaft and a small circular saw at the end. This possessed much better timing than I normally do when playing as the flexible shaft sheared as I finished cutting the last slot. Phew!

This time I used a proper Dremel, and got hold of their mini circular saw attachment which is a bit more sturdy. I had to get some 18mm MDF sliced up at the local B&Q place as they cut so much straighter than me, and then pieced all the bits together.

Of course, the granite bed and GPS controlled servo system may have worked, but up against steel 19" rack hardware, kitchen drawer slides and a small piece of 40mm thick laminated chipboard, that kind of old-hat technology was never going to get very far ;-)

I had to whittle a matching strange shape so that the Dremel saw could be clamped as there is no specific way of fixing it.

I had previously used a small 1mm drill in a milling machine at work to mark where the slots should be accurately-ish, and all this jig has to do is allow a perpendicular cut to be made. Sounds easy.

The perspex now sports freshly cut slots, and in the right places. It doesn't get better than this. Well, not round here anyway. The fboard was carefully prised away from the extremely sticky double sided tape, and after a quick degunk with acetone, the fboard was glued onto the neck with more epoxy resin.

The bond was held in place by a couple of clamps, and a really nice transformer that Robin found in his garage. This looks to be approx 300VA and measures 125 x 125 x 110mm. It has a split primary and binary weighted secondaries. It sounds *perfect* to replace the feeble 50VA toroidal unit in my 50W valve amplifier as an output tranny. I'm using it here as a bloody great weight, but I can see its potential elsewhere...

Now the glue has dried, the chips are down, the word is out, and the time is right. The edges have been trimmed back and it is starting to look like perspex wasn't such a bad move. I think the final proof of that one will be when the frets get bludgeoned in ;-o

Oh, I rigged up the transformer (bypassing the toroid) and it sounds glorious! I can see the next dilemma coming up on the horizon as there is no way this chunk of iron is ever going to fit in the valve amp's 3U case. I will just have to make a bigger one...



Second B@ss

As I've got one guitar under my belt already, Second b@ss seemed the ideal moniker. Oh-oh it has made it into a link. I hope no-one is using it...

The new bass is to have a traditional neck bolted on to a spangly body. The neck was found on ebay and I was chuffed to find it had a head that didn't look too fendery. It had a rosewood fboard, and the frets were quite worn, so it needed remedial work.

The first step was to whip the old frets out. They were a sort of goldy colour and didn't look very hard as the string winding marks could be clearly seen on many of them. In my usual delicate "skilled craftsman" kind of way I totally mullered the brittle rosewood and it had to be planed off. I consoled myself with the fact that rosewood and metallic orange paint would not look that groovy together so I got pondering on the easiest way out of the situation whilst saving face if possible.

The easy way out had already left so I was stuck with a more uphill struggle. The moonbass had an ebony fboard and it looks very nice to my biassed eyes. With the (essential) orange body in mind, I realised that a maple fboard would look a bit nothingy, so there was only one colour left that would work.

White.

Well, it looks great on a washing machine ;-)

I looked around for any exotic woods that happen to be brilliant white and did not find any. The option of bleaching only seemed a short term solution before the wood returned to its natural colour (or needed its roots doing). I picked up the moonbass to ensure the neighbours were as annoyed as I was, and then noticed that the 3rd fret marker (the pacman) was still in good shape. OK, a little on the plump side, but he's always had a 22mm waistband...

This 22mm perspex disc had not showed any signs of wear. It's on the 3rd fret, and strings are more likely to rub against the fboard when the gaps between them are at their largest, ie the head end. So as the lightbulb above my head went 'ding' the way forward was set in, er, plastic. The rosewood will be replaced with white perspex.

To add a little strength to the neck I wanted to first bond some carbon fibre sheet to the freshly planed neck wood (probably maple).

This is to keep the neck height around the same as it was before once it has a 5mm layer of perspex on it, as the rosewood was about 1/4" in the centre. I used two layers of 1.2mm carbon fibre sheet, a couple of tubes of araldite and some lengths of wood to clamp it together.

Trimming carbon fibre is not a pleasant task and it was another round of teeny weeny splinters embedded in my fingers. The end result seems nice and rigid, so it matters little that perspex is not strong, as long as the surface is tough.

Shame this surface won't be seen on the finished neck!

The Bloques Big Birthday Bash

Ah - forgot to press the publish button 2 years ago...

Moonbassalpha got its first major outing on 6/June/09 in Chichester at The Bloques Big Birthday Bash.

Since then, the neck has warped slightly, but in a Dingwall kind of way. It is only very slight and doesn't affect my playing. I think it was down to the wenge having a definite twist in the grain, even when stacking the layers in different directions when creating the neck. That is the downside of mail order wood buying! But that aside, everything else is still working fine.

I had to change the Bartolini pickups as I found them too dark. I could not get exactly the same size replacements so a bit of mild tweakage and some cheap £10 a go pups later and it sounds better to my ears.

March 2011 - Oving

Only a month ago I found myself buying a bass neck from ebay. It's straight, and doesn't have the typical fender scroll at the end. I scribbled a few different ideas down on paper since then and one has risen to the top of the stack...

Using Paint to get faux 3d didn't come out too bad for someone that is more used to drawing stickmen. I think the top horn needs to be a bit smaller, but the key points are

1. I cannot buy a bass that looks like this (hmm - deja vu)

2. It uses a ready built neck (though it needs an overhaul)

3. I like curves!

4. It looks pleasantly unlikely to work

5. I like orange

6. I've seen the Delano Xtender oval shaped pickup and want an excuse to use it

I reckon this one would benefit from being made out of a thick piece of maple. The string tension is going to make a lot of demands on the strength of the body wood, so I'm thinking of about 2.5" thick, but with a roundish cross section.

And definitely no lights this time.

Now I've gone and done it.

It's finished. Woohoo!


MoonBassAlpha has been created and now it has got to stand up to being used. I have taken the opportunity to take some some higher resolution images before it gets scratched and bashed!




The ash (light wood either side of the neck) has really come to life now that the oil / wax finish has been applied. The grain figuring is quite pleasing. The controls in the upper cutaway are for the fboard LEDs, whilst the lower cutaway has two volume knobs and a pickup selector switch. The switch is a special 4 pole on-on-on variety that allows the coils in each pickup to be connected in series, parallel or use only a single coil. This gives a good range of tonal flexibility.






The side you see when you're playing it...






...and the side you see when you're lying on the floor.



The walnut stripe sandwiched between the ash front and back offers a nice contrasting warm colour.






The back looks nice too. The red of the padauk is quite striking, and the grain of the wenge shows up with what looks like alternating black / milk chocolate stripes. The back of the neck looks a little bulky, but there are a lot of wires that are routed around the trussrod and into the upper horn at that point.

Although difficult to see all of them here, the copper plates used as control covers were polished for me by Ace. Good work, but then you should see his car...






This one reminds me that at an early stage I dismissed the constraints imposed by a stand. I wanted the guitar to look how I wanted it to look when it was being played, rather than make it terribly sensible when it is resting. The downside is that although it is perched on the stand for the photos, it really needs its own stand built. If I sneeze it will probably fall off.






The front of the headstock has a hole in it...










...and so does the back. I am glad that the trussrod adjustment is done at the body end - it leaves the headstock less cluttered.





I had to take a few shots without the flash so that the fboard animation could be seen. Here's a few, but the pacman in particular doesn't come out too well on longer exposure times as it is moving! It does show the idea though.



Sound wise the guitar has a good solid bottom end, helped by the dense woods and slightly thicker-than-normal neck profile. The pickup switch and volumes allow several tone combinations. I really like the single pickup coil sound which comes through very clean. The humbucking switch positions give more depth to the sound with the series position having a really fat sound.

I am really pleased with the bass, but there are a couple of things I didn't get quite right.

1. Sharp internal angles are very difficult to sand and oil/wax, so they look a little rough in places.

2. Stoning the fboard is a skill that I don't think I have mastered yet. The fboard is reasonable, but still slightly wavy, causing some fret buzz in places. The string action is around 2.5-3.0mm so it can't be that bad.

3. The circuitry that drives the LEDs can be heard! It is only faint, and with the rest of the band doing their job it would never be heard, but for recording purposes it is best to leave the animation off. I reckon it looks the biz, so I'm still happy to put up with it.

Next up is to rebuild my bass amp - the power amp is fine, but the signal stages are showing signs of wear. I think that it was too complicated last time, so its time to rethink what is needed in the way of signal crunching controls. At least this shouldn't cause any splinters.


Don't worry - there are other mad people out there building weird things in their garages.

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.