I planned working on the last templates tonight, but actually I’m fed up with those tempates…. needed to do something a little bit more fun.

So here’s a freshly routed pickguard:

I still need to route the edges to a 45 degree angle, and the pickup route needs some attention, it’s not as smooth and straight as I want it, but this is how it’ll look on the body:

And a nice shot with the pickup:

The next day I finished the pickguard.. dotted the I’s and routed the outer edges to a 45 degree angle. The result is pretty nice, I’m really excited about this. I will drill the holes during assembly.

Tonight I spent a few hours sanding the body with 80 grit to smooth out the roundovers and remove minor marks from the router and planer. Now the body is ready for further carvings / routings. Not much difference with previous pictures, but otherwise it would be a rather uninteresting post:

Furthermore I made these pictures to see how the Macassar fingerboard blank looks on the body:

Right now I’m a little bit in doubt about the pickguard and pearl block inlays, as they take away a considerable part of those good looking woods….

.. to be continued!

It’s update time again… sorry for the pic heavy post, but I need to show today’s result from a few different angles.

This is what I started with, you can really see the flames with this light too:

And a detail of the flamed maple, wenge and swamp ash body sandwich:

/me doing some routings over here (no pictures of the process due to low battery level of phone and high stress level of builder)

So, after an afternoon of routing, this is what I’ve got:

I really like how the accent layer turned out, the body thickness is just fine at 43 mm and the roundover’s also pretty neat. I need to do some sanding and maybe grain filling, I may carve a tummy cut and the transition from body to neck still needs some work… so there’s more to come.

It’s starting to get fun now ….

I removed the clamps after about 9 hours and got this:

I started routing the top flush with the body, revealing this:

So, today’s result is the following:

I now need to route the roundover, but that’s something for tomorrow (and frightening). Then, after some sanding, I’m ready to start with the neck. The pickup cavities and neck pocket have to wait untill I finished the neck, ideally, but I’m not sure if I’ll wait for that… (or if I’ll have the patience to wait for that).

I’m happy … luckily, my worries were unfounded. After about 24 hours of clamping, it came out almost completely flat and the glue line turned out to be perfect .

I applied the glue on the veneer with a roller:

A thicker layer, spread with a piece of cardboard goes on the maple top:

Then, I sandwiched this between two boards of 3/4" thick MDF to divide clamping pressure and attached all of my 12 clamps:

I left this for an hour, removed all clamps, cleaned up the excess glue and masking tape (at this stage, the top was curved due to the increased moisture content caused by the Titebond glue) and then reclamped everything for another 24 hours. After that, the glue was completely cured and the top came out way better then I thought it would, almost completely flat:

Cutting out the top safely outside the body contour showed the following glue line:

This is the cut out top from the front:

And this is how it looks from behind:

And another side view:

Up until this point, I’m very pleased with the results of my work and I got some of my confidence back. I took a long time figuring out how I would do this and took great care while glueing, still turned out to be pretty exciting, but in the end I was glad to see the preparation paid off.

Currently I’m figuring out how to align this correctly to the body core. I will probably glue that together tomorrow.

Right now, I’m impatiently waiting to discover the result of my glueing job last night… I glued the veneer to the top, using the same procedure as with the test piece, but since it’s such a large area I found it very difficult to get everything done before open clamp time expired and I’m not sure I used the right amount of glue and if I got enough clamping pressure (I used 12 clamps and two 3/4" thick boards of MDF to divide pressure). I practiced the whole setup before I started glueing, but it still stays a nerve-racking job…

After leaving everything for about one hour, I removed all clamps and cleaned up the excess glue and removed the masking tape that held the two halves of veneer together. Then I put everything back in clamps with new pieces of wax paper. This way, I have less change my MDF clamp cauls get glued to the working piece and I’ve got less lumps of glue around my working piece when it’s completely dried out.

I noticed two things: because of the glue, the moisture content of the maple board increased massively on the side of the veneer, causing it to bend like crazy… with two of those tops I could’ve made a drum . The other thing was that the edges of the glue joint weren’t closed very well, but that’s somewhat logical, because the pressure was applied on the contour of the body, not on the edges of the whole board.

Tonight I might have time to cut out the top and that’s when I’m going to find out if I succeeded in getting such a nice glue joint as I did on the much smaller test piece.

I made a test piece to practice glueing the top and veneer and route the roundovers:

Pretty happy with that (mind that it’s not yet sanded really well).

I first glued the veneer to the top as a whole and then cut it out together with the jigsaw. This way, I didn’t have to cut the veneer with a knife, which causes cracks easier and then you’ll end up with the veneer protruding in your glued sandwich, which makes it easier to break.

So, after glueing the veneer to the top and cutting it with a jigsaw, I glued that to the ash core, routed the top and veneer flush with the body core and finally did the roundover in a lot of small steps.

First, I got burn marks from the router, but after lowering router speed and increasing feeding speed, I got it just right. No burn marks and a smooth edge. That’s what this test piece was meant for .

I used a small paint roller to spread the glue over the veneer in a very thin layer, making sure the grain was properly filled with glue. The other part (ash or maple) I spread the glue with a card in a much thicker layer. Pressed it together with as much clamp as available / possible. Before glueing, I also covered the sides of the ash with masking tape, so I do not have to sand the excess of.

Now, onto the real stuff…

I finished the last master templates. Number 6 and 7 are a pickup cavity & neck pocket template and a template for the pickguard:

Also did some other small things, like practicing how to cut veneer. Not very interesting, but I got this tip to put tape where you want to cut and it really works out, so I thought I’d share:

Without the tape my knife got pulled from its path by the rough grain of wenge (like rutting), and if I cut in a specific angle to the grain, it tends to split. The tape solves all of those issues very well.

Last thing today was drilling the alignment holes through the maple top, which I found to be very scary. I checked and checked, a dozen times.. wouldn’t want to drill through the top in the wrong place… but those holes come in handy when glueing the top and veneer to the body. Since I used the same holes for attaching the body shape template to the body core, they’re already in there and a perfect way to fixate the top in the exact right spot while applying pressure when glueing.

I’m back again, overcame some difficulties, not yet completely satisfied with results and progress, but I’m confident I will still be able to make this project succesful!

Today I received an important new tool, a 1/2" roundover bit. Pricy, but good quality. I’m a bit anxious using it on the swamp ash, since I got tear out last time, but I will make a test piece first.

Then I test fitted the pickups in the template I’ve made. It still needs some small adjustments, but it’s pretty close already:

After some reshaping and masking tape patches, I’m ready to copy the master template into the template that also contains the neck pocket and gets shaped to the body contours for easy alignment. I will do that next time:

Back to the maple top. This is the jig I’ve used to plane it down from 8,5 mm to 6 mm. Don’t copy this method, results were bad:

As I already told in the previous post, I used a sled (same method as with the control cavity cover) to correct this. That worked out pretty well (no pictures, sorry), but didn’t deliver a glueable surface as well. So, I screwed down the two halves of the top to a thick piece of MDF; the maple wasn’t completely flat and this ensured a flat working surface. The screws are all just outside the body contour and I will also use them when glueing the two halves together later on. I then sanded and scraped the two pieces flat, by hand, making them ready for glueing:

Time to glue the two halves of the top together. You can never have too many clamps and I barely got enough, as I used all of my clamps on this:

But, I’m rather pleased with the result, this being the glue line:

Text-only update tonight:

I wanted to plane down my flamed maple top, because both the body and top came in thicker than I’d ordered or than I counted on. The body is 37 mm instead of 35 mm and the top is 8.5 mm instead of 7 mm. This gave me, together with the wenge veneer, a total thickness of 46.1 mm, which I do not like. Too thick.

So, I made a router jig with the router on top (handheld mode), but since the pressure varies when operating the router, the result came out to be very inconsistent, a.k.a. awkward. Really. So, today, I’ve made a large sled like the one from the cavity cover and used that to plane the maple. Had to take of a bit more, but now the result is much better. Since I do not press down the sled (only move it around holding the sides) and the router is fixed, this is obvious a better way. Although, it still needs some sanding and I’ve got a deviation of about 0.20 to 0.25 mm.. top thickness right now is about 5.75 mm and the total thickness will be 43.2 mm.

There was another difficulty: one half was slightly bowed and I needed to press it down while routing / planing. This is where the sled worked better too: I clamped the top tightly against the sled and countersunk some screws in there to keep it flat.

Now, I still need to sand the halves some more, get the joint right (and planed correctly), glue the two halves together, cut out the body shape and sand the top flat.. this was certainly not a very good idea and I’m very curious if I get a good looking top with an almost perfect glue joint like on my first bass…

Conclusion: I will never try to ‘plane’ large surfaces again with my router and self made jigs… I really need to start looking for an affordable jointer and thickness planer. Or I’ll visit a local cabinet maker for the remaining parts of this bass.

When I proceed with the top, I’ll post some more pictures.