Being built right now.
Body Work Part 1:
Although the the title and the right navigation menu of this page has a drawing of the bass in it, it didn't come first, at least not in that form. As a matter of fact, you can see that I used photographs of the body wood and the headstock in the drawing. In building freeform, I often change the drawing and/or the instrument on a whim. In this case I had drawn up a much narrower body, based on a piece of wood I already had. It was just an odd piece given to me by someone who knew I would find use for it. I just didn't like the narrow design, and trying to force a design to fit a piece of wood isn't guaranteed to work. This called for one of those "back to the drawing board" moments.
After some thinking and drawing, I came up with a new body design. Being wider by around 2.5 inches, I needed to either buy a new body blank, or modify the one I had. I looked around a bit for a new piece, but couldn't find anything suitable, so modification it was. Here's a shot of my Japanese ryoba saw in the cut, it makes a very thin cut, and does so on the pull stroke which makes for a straighter cut, and leaves a finer surface than western saws. You can see the first draft of the body penciled on it.
As I wrote earlier when describing the neck wood, paduke can be one of several species of wood, and that is the case here, as the body is not as porous, nor as hard as the paduke I used for the neck. Here are the cut pieces side by side:
To widen the body enough to accommodate the new design, I decided to use some of the paduke left from the board I cut the neck from, ebony to match the fingerboard and a few thin strips of maple for contrast. It took more sawing and planing before I laminated the pieces together and glued them in between the body halves.
While planing the laminates flush to the body, I stopped to take this photo:
Planing laminates of hard wood with opposing grain directions is not easy without a very sharp planer blade, and by sharp I mean "Stupid Sharp", which is an actual method where you hone the blade with ever finer grits of sand paper, all the way down to 2500 grit and then finish it off with polishing compound. You can tell a very sharp planer blade, as when set for a very shallow cut, it will shave curls of very hard wood finer than paper. A plain sharp planer blade will shred it. This is what a stupid sharp blade does:
After planing the laminates flush, it's ready for the next procedure, but I saved that for another time, as I still wanted to refine the drawing a bit. I will get back to it later, in another chapter.
Now doesn't it go well with the neck?
