Encouraged by some fellow TalkBass members, I picked up working on the body again. The neck, as well as both pickups, didn’t fit yet, so those routes needed to be retouched. At first, I tried sanding the edges, but that came out to be completely impossible.

I worked out different ways of coping with this task in my mind, but making a perfect setup to re-route didn’t seem easy. But today, I felt lucky and went for the eyeballing and working ‘by feeling’ way of building….

So, I used the shifting-the-original-template-technique twice to reshape the neck pocket in several spots, and to my surprise, it came out spot on… wow!

It doesn’t sit in awfully tight, but I consider that a good thing, because now, there’s still room for the finish. If I add one layer of thin masking tape to the neck, it doesn’t fit anymore at all, so with the finish on, I think it’s just perfect.

Onto the pickup routes.. that got me thinking for a while too, because I cannot use my guided router bits to widen up the corners, as the radius of those bits is too large. Sanding doesn’t work and filing isn’t providing consistent results either. But then, I got an idea: I used my Dremel with its router base and a very small router bit (+/- 2 mm) and let the shaft ride the template. I used the template-shifting-technique to widen up the routes, but also routed a few corners freehand.

And after some nerve racking moments, the neck pickup fitted well in it’s new home:

And after that, so did the bridge pickup. Being happy with the results, I just couldn’t resist….

Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?

Well, I’ve started building a radius block myself, but I lost motivation very early in the process. For only 18 euro incl. shipping I’ve ordered one on eBay that should be wide enough (if the given measurements are correct). Now I only have to wait two more weeks or more before I can proceed with the neck. But I can do some work on the body until then… if I have time.

And whenever you don’t know how to proceed or solve a ‘problem’ (like the radius block that doesn’t fit), it’s always good to turn around and look at what you’ve already achieved, so here’s a quick full mockup:

That made me smile again, so it helped :-).

As promised, some pictures of the inlayed dots (you can still see some glue around the dots, but I hope that disappears when sanding in the radius):

And oh, one more thing.. this morning I was in for an unpleasant surprise: the sanding block is only 7 cm wide and my neck is 7.5+ cm at it’s widest point…

Had some very busy weeks, so not much happened with the bass… but today I drilled the holes for the position marker dots and glued them in with CA. I didn’t take pics because my phone ran out of power, but I’ll prob shoot some tomorrow. The result is okay – it’s very, very hard to get everything perfectly aligned when drilling by hand (even with a drill press), but I guess I’m satisfied with the result. Only one is a few tenth of a mm off.

Today I also received the 16" radiusing block. So next step will be radiusing. Then, I’ll recut fret slots if necessary and do the binding, followed by the side markers. Apart from fretting, neck profiling and installing machine heads, the neck will then be done and I’ll move to the body to touch up the pickup routes and neck pocket. So we’re approaching the finish line, but at a very slow pace..

Had a chance to work on the bass for an hour today and managed to do a few minor things.

Routed the binding channel around the fingerboard, a little bit hard to see, but here’s a close up:

Routed the recess for the nut with my Dremel:

And the finished recess for the nut:

Not so much progress last week, but I did buy a new fret slotting saw: a Japanese fret saw! It’s the best upgrade ever! From a small saw that had a lot of binding, which made fret slotting a nightmare, to a saw that easily slides through Ebony. I wish I bought it in the first place:

The reason I bought the Japanese saw, is that I couldn’t get deep enough with my original fret slotting saw. So tonight I redid all the fret slots and cut them to the required depth, also taking into account the inteded radius:

Next steps are routing for the binding and installing the pearl position marker dots.

Today I made the second cut for the nut and I’ve routed the fingerboard ending towards the headstock. Then, I spent some time to perfectly align the board to the neck and made a fixture to hold the neck for drilling the alignment holes. I solved the problem of not having the right drill bit for the size of nails I have by simply drilling the hole with a nail. It works like a charm, wouldn’t have thought it would, but it does . I used 1.2 mm nails through the nut area and the 24th fret. Then I covered up the truss rod (which is just sitting in without any glue, kit or tape, except the plastic tube around the rod that came with the TR) and put some Titebond on the neck. I removed the tape and put the fingerboard on, aligning it with the nails. I’m very pleased and happy using this method, because there’s absolutely no moving around. Here’s the neck and fingerboard with some clamps on it:

After about one hour, I remove the clamps and clean everything up. At this stage, the glue has set, but the excess is still easy to remove. I also removed the nails at this point. Here’s before removing them:

And after I removed them you can see the result of the fingerboard end at the nut, with the TR slightly protruding. I’m satisfied with this result. The little holes will be gone after putting in the nut:

I also put tape around the neck before glueing, so I can easily remove excess glue afterwards. A great tip I’ve got a long time ago and I always use it. I hate sanding of excess glue if I don’t have to:

And after I’ve cleaned everything up, I put it back into the clamps so the glue can cure completely over night. I had a slight forward warp in the neck, so I made sure I clamped the sandwich (first time also) to a flat part of my workbench. As far as I could see it already helped a bit. So with the clamps back on, I can get some sleep now :-).

Tonight I did some tests for the fingerboard. I routed the roundover at the nut end of the fb (I am going to place the nut in the fingerboard, not against it). I think I will hand shape it afterwards, but this is a good starting point. It’s going to be radiused afterwards anyway, but this will be done before it goes on the neck. I also did my first ever pearl dot inlay, not difficult at all, but I still wanted a test before I started drilling in the fb itself. By the way, I used gold pearl I had lying around; for this bass it’s going to be white mop instead of the ‘gold’. My test piece:

(The photograph doesn’t really show the quality of the pearl, it actually looks a lot better then this….)

And this is how the transition is going to look roughly:

My drawing / original design has 6 mm dots. But actually, I like the 5 mm ones quite a lot! So, now I’m in doubt… There’s very little space for two offset 6 mm dots in the 24th fret and since I’m doing an offset layout, I think 5 mm looks a little bit more subtle than 6 mm dots.. which look better when placed on the centerline. This is a test with 5 mm dots:

Next time I will probably cut out the slot for the nut, route the fb ending roundover, rough taper and glue the fingerboard on. Not sure yet if I drill for the dots before or after glueing the fb to the neck. Oh, and the truss rod will go in without glue, I’ll just slide it in there.

Fingerboard’s in the works… all slots are cut and I drew the centerline and outline on the ‘blank’. I hope to glue it on the neck this weekend, but I’m not yet sure how to keep it in place while glueing:

The neck pocket seems to fit after some sanding, I got the neck in there succesfully, but it’s still *very* tight. So I’ll do some more fine tuning… but at least I held the bass for the first time with the body and neck together, feels good!!