Time to buy the wood! I ordered the body blank last week and this week I gave Vox Humana a call, if they also had a nice 6 mm maple top. They did and I drove to Vlaardingen on Thursday to pick up the wood, along with glue (Franklin Titebond!) and some useful tips. I must say this wood is really, really beautiful!! The Honduras Mahogany is about 40 years old, has a nice texture and of course, it’s bone dry.

I started out by glueing the two body halves together with Titebond. For this I bought three really heavy duty clamps and some tape to cover the wood around the joint to easily remove excess glue. Then I glued the top and drew the outline on it.

Today I spent almost all day on rough cutting the top and body with my jigsaw. Since the blade of a jigsaw easily bends when going around curves and 40 mm-thick hardwood isn’t an easy job for such a tool, you have to be patient and cut v-e-e-e-ry slowly. I tried to cut straight lines around the outline as much as possible and I think I did a great job.

Also I learnt that sawing mahogany produces a lot of dust compared to other kinds of wood.. and since I wasn’t wearing safety wear I now know what mahogany tastes like, how it feels up your nose and that it isn’t very pleasant to have in your eyes.

Now I got the design I bought a 9 millimeter thick piece of beech plywood for the template and a brand new jigsaw with more precision and power, so I could also cut the body blank with it later on.

Since the template is used to guide the router after cutting the body with a jigsaw, it is very important that the contour of the template is as smooth as possible! So I took great care in sawing out the template. I bought a sawblade especially for cutting plywood which is also very small to get round curves easily. When I had sawn the template, I started sanding and filling the contours of it. Every once in a while I got back to it to feel, sand, fill, sand.. and so on.

This week I learnt that building a guitar is about being a perfectionist (which I am) and being patient (which I am most certainly not). Also great care and a slow working pace help to get it right.

On Saturday I ordered the body blank from Vox Humana, two separate pieces of honduras mahogany measuring 50 x 17,5 x 4 cm.

This week, I started all over again with the design. Not on full scale, but just sketching body shapes on a small piece of paper. I think I drew like hundreds of ‘m. And when I almost gave up… well after midnight.. there it was! Okay, I must admit I’ve saw all possible basses I could find on the internet for some inspiration, but I drew it myself and I’m very happy with it!

Then I started thinking of the wood. Of course, I read a lot about tonewoods the past few weeks and I made up my mind about the wood I’d like to use. The body will be build from honduras mahogany, a nice reddisch brown wood with a warm tone and nice lows. Perfect for my bass! Then I want a good looking top, maybe something like flamed maple. This is a much brighter sounding wood and could be a good combination with the mahogany body.

Maybe I am going to make the body semi-hollow with a soundhole and a laminated center, built up from different kinds of wood (like ash or maple and wengé), but I am not yet sure about that. For the neck I am thinking about maple with an indian rosewood fretboard.

So, I started designing the guitar, for that is the first step after all. I created a huge piece of paper by taping four A3-sized sheets together and made a full scale drawing of my future bass. I decided it should be a jazz bass with two classical jazz pickups, 4 strings and 24 frets. It took me over 3 days. And that’s when I learned that it’s actually not that easy to design a good looking bass with the right proportions…

This week I read the book ‘Building Electric Guitars’, written by Martin Koch. It was very interesting to read about how guitars are build. First of all, I got a far better understanding of the construction of guitars and secondly, it made me think that I could actually pull this off.

I always dreamt of building my own bass and for some reason, this idea came to me again this week. So I started looking around on the internet for some information. Pretty soon I found a very helpful forum (Luthier’s Corner on TalkBass.com) and some nice books about this topic. The project had started!