Received both the pots and the knobs today, so I drilled holes for the control pots tonight:

Well, that went quite well, positioning went perfect, as by design, and the pots fit well:

You can see it’s a good thing I ordered mini pots, as regular pots wouldn’t fit at all, especially the volume control. On the bright side I’ll have some room left for a future upgrade to active tone control (I reckon a Delano Sonar II and battery would still fit in there):

By the way, my top (5.5 mm) and pickguard (2.5 mm) are too thick for the control pot shafts. Long shaft pots would’ve been better, but they are not available in a mini version or as a blend pot, so I will have to drill some larger recess holes (1" in diameter and 3 mm deep) from the back to be able to install the pots. Just another thing on my list before I can start finishing the bass.

And of course some shots with the knobs on. Despite the fact that they are not closer together than normal, the small body and small pickguard make them look rather large. I’m a little bit in doubt, maybe I’ll try mini dome knobs on there… but I’m not sure. If the rest of the hardware is on I think it will balance out anyway.

Yesterday I drilled the wiring channels between the pickups and to the control cavity. I also drilled the pickup attachment screw holes and… the scariest hole of them all: the grounding wire channel for the bridge! Man do I hate that. But with careful measurements and some extra care it came out the way I intended. I really haven’t been this nervous on the entire build as with this task.

Here you can see the wiring channel and some of the pickup attachment holes:

And the dreaded bridge grounding wire channel:

I also did some colouring tests. First with a local product ‘Ecoline’ from Talens, a concentrated water ink, just because I happened to have that lying around. The first test failed, trying to achieve a nice mix between sienna red, vermilion and bright yellow. It came out too orange and watery:

The second one is a small piece I painted with pure vermilion (for the first test I mixed the ink with water), and the colour came out rather nice, but I still do not like working with this product for this application. I also heared that it loses colour over time, so I better stick to commercially available dyes that are intended for this purpose.

So this was fun, but I ordered bright red and black dye (the latter to enhance the figure) right after this test. We’ll see if that works out.

I learned that volume pots should be logarithmic (also called audio taper) and tone pots should be linear. But I saw some threads where people say you should also use a logarithmic pot for tone controls. So I did some more research and came across the following vid:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ANG3OrL5HI

Of course, it’s still a personal preference, but based on these findings I am definitely going for a logarithmic pot for both volume and tone on this bass.

Just wanted to share, great to see someone demonstrating different pots for different applications (his YouTube channel contains more interesting videos covering this topic).

Another update!

I wasn’t satisfied with the bridge placement. I kept looking at it and it just felt wrong. After taking careful measurements I found out it sat on at an angle of about 0.3 degrees. That doesn’t look like much, but if you extend the sides of the bridge to the fingerboard, the one at the bass side was 5 mm further away from the 24th fret end than the one at the treble side. That’s not good…

So I needed to fix the bridge placement. I decided to plug the two outer holes and keep the one in the middle to pivot the bridge, then mark and drill new holes and re-attach the bridge. Yesterday I plugged the holes with a small wooden dowel and some Titebond:

Titebond cures in half an hour, but I needed it to be fully cured because the new holes would only be shifted by 0.5 mm. I let it cure overnight and today I marked the new holes, using the center screw to pivot the bridge. Next time, I’m going to use this technique right away, because it’s much easier to get it right.

Now, it’s on _perfectly_ straight. And I’m happy.

Time to move to the next assembly task. I marked the positions of all the pickguard screws through a paper template using masking tape to scribe on:

Then, I drilled all holes using a 3 mm drill bit, followed by a counter sink bit:

Marking through the freshly drilled holes onto the body and drilling 2 mm holes in the body was the next step:

Et voila:

Looking cool! Looks like a lot of screws due to the small size of the pickguard, but I like the bling-bling style of it. A close up:

After checking everything again I prepared for drilling one of the scariest mounting holes of the bass:

And ready. Drilled exactly on the marked spots. So far, so good:

And the result:

String through holes are yet to be made. I tried fitting them in 11 mm holes and it’s a bit loose, but with only one to two layers of masking tape it’s a snug fit. With the finish incorporated, 11 mm is probably going to do the trick. Now I need to find a way to make the five holes align perfectly.

Only 49 holes left. And the neck profile.

I worked on the neck profile again, and although it’s getting close, I’m still not satisfied. It still is too much of a D-shape. I don’t want a C-shape, but it does need to be more towards a C-shape from where it’s now. The current state of the neck now looks like this:

Needing a break from the neck shaping, I turned to the neck joint. First, figuring this out like drill size, location and order:

I first marked the locations of the neck screws from the inside of the pocket (easier to reference, since I have a one piece body under the top it’s a bit harder to determine the center line as a reference for any measurements). Then I drilled from within the neck pocket to the back of the body with a 1.5 mm drill bit. This gave me little guides for the ferrule holes

I first used a 16 mm brad bit for the 15 mm ferrules but I didn’t like the result, so I went to the hobby store for a 15 mm forstner bit and I think it’s worth every penny! The result is very clean and the ferrule just pops in, really nice. Didn’t work with this type of bit yet, but I love’em! So, an action shot of the ferrule hole drilling:

.. and the result, very clean:

After drilling these holes, I used the marks made by the point of the forstner bit to center the drill for the screw holes. I drilled the 3 mm holes right through body and neck at the same time. Then, I re-drilled the holes in the body to 4 mm. Installation went perfect and I like the result a lot:

Of course, we need a close up:

It does look a bit dirty around the screws and ferrules, but that’s the candle wax I used to help the screws a bit. I can assure you, with the right measurements and drilling, using any kind of wax, the screws drive in perfectly and do not bind or snap at all.

She’s coming together nicely:

Next step will probably be the bridge (string through!?), followed by wiring holes, pickup attachment screw holes and the tuner holes. Then, I’ll drill the electronics cavity cover attachment holes, neck strap holes and input hole. Shouldn’t forget the pickguard attachment screw holes too.

I reshaped the neck a bit tonight. I made the part between the 8th fret to the heel more round and in line with the rest of the neck (starting with the rasp again) and finally I improved the shape along the complete length of the neck with a shave. It’s a lot better now, maybe still not there, but close. It’s a flat regular D shape all along right now.

I also laid out the neck attachment layout with the actual ferrules over the CAD-drawing. It’s going to look like this:

Tonight I worked on the heel transition of the neck and did some finishing touches:

Must say, it feels great, very wide and thin. The shape is still a bit ‘square’ … may be too much D-shaped, but I’ll leave it like this for now and check back tomorrow or the day after to see how it looks then.

So, I’ll present to you the more or less finished neck for my bass, I’m happy :-)

For the second carving session I concentrated on the overall neck shape and on the volute, mainly using a scraper (actually the blade from my spokeshave, but that works very well this way), sandpaper and sometimes a rasp or a file. I must say it’s taking shape rather well and I still like my approach so far.

Next time I will concentrate on the transition at the body end and the neck shape on that side of the neck. The fourth and last session should be the final touch and completion of the neck profile.

Last night I started carving the neck! I intend to go with a rather sleek profile, but maybe more of a D shape than C. You can see my main tools I use for this job (before the sandpaper kicks in). I mainly use rasps and files (round, half round and flat), a spoke shave (but still not satisfied with this one, so I use the blade alone for fine tuning the shape later on).

So, first, I start with the volute, I need to remove that ugly step created by the routing I did, without touching the routed part, because (at the center) that’s already at the desired thickness (+ 0.2 mm for sanding):

The lump of tape is to protect the back of the headstock and indicating the shape.

When that’s out of the way, as you can see here, I can carry on with the complete neck:

Well, I would like to have some sort of a stand to be able to clamp the neck to, but for now I just clamp the end of the neck on the table with a few cloths inbetween to protect the fingerboard, and start carving:

Here you can see I’m working my way gradually through the wood to meet the neck (remove anything that is not a bass neck) with the rasp:

After the rasp I switch to a file, slower process but less change of cutting too deep. This is from the treble side:

And this is what’s going on on the bass side. The volute will be deeper and more pronounced, but I will save that for later. I need to have a better idea of the neck shape before I know how to shape the volute:

And some pictures from the other side, after I put it away on the shelf:

I must say it already feels superb! I know it’s not finished, but you can feel where it’s going and the dimensions are working well I guess. I hope the carving job comes out great in the end. Can’t wait for the next run.