Today I thought just checking the body status wouldn’t harm, so I released it out of the clamps. Turns out, the warp didn’t disappear completely, but got noticable less. Especially the horns became straight again very well. The lower bout still has some cupping, but I can live with that. You cannot see it by eye. I hope it stays like this, maybe I let it sleep in its clamps for a while to be sure. So this is what I’ve got:

I’m not ready to start on the fingerboard blank, so I decided to go for the neck pocket and pickup cavities. I started out by drilling the pickup cavity corners with a 7 mm drill. My router bit’s diameter is too large for those tight corners and this is my solution to cope with that:

Then, I aligned my previously made template on the body. It has a protruding support surrounding the neck pocket, so my router doesn’t tip over at the edge and I clamped it down with three heavy clamps well outside the routing area. The clamps also held the body flat against the table, so my cavities have a flat bottom as well:

I used a template guide to get to the right depth, removed it and used the ball bearing to clean up the cavities. This is how it looked after routing:

And without the template, it’s starting to look like a bass:

I couldn’t resist to try the pickguard on there. It fits remarkably well, I’m happy with it!

The neck doesn’t fit yet, the template was very tight already and on the hardwood it seems to have lost its flexibility opposed to the MDF and plywood template… but that’s for another time.