it's a 4 string "metal" bass, active electronics, well, this picture say all the info needed.
I got this "Enzino", local wood, pretty similar to chestnut and Ash, but with some differences, its a bit more trebly than chestnut, and has that "open pore tone" taptone, not sure how to explain it, but this kinda of grain in hard woods have a certain tone that I just love it, in the beggining I was planning on using as a whole body, but ended up using up as a top with a laurelia back.
the cut is perfectly riftsawn, so I will keep some wood to make some necks, if I have the chance to.
laurelia for the back, this wood is lovely to work in a lot of ways, also in tone, very light in weight, but damn it's ugly.
designing this was quite a challenge, the client loves BC-Rich but I hate them, we had to make a balance with a "functional" model as well as "good metal looks", (also something that won't make me look as an idiot), people say it looks like a leaf or a batman, either way this is the design, I grew some liking to it even though it's still like an ugly the child of the family.
I use PSD for my designs, compare them to real life pictures of other basses designs to get an idea on how would feel.
it's quite comfortable for my surprise, the template I mean.
got the enzino cut in a local wood workshop, nice guy over there, in the end I got a thinner top that I would have liked, but still will work just as well.
this pictures are quite old, now I have better clamping system than this, it still gave a good fit.
I crafted this 3 piece lingue/sirari/lingue neck blank (lingue local high quality wood, quite sweet sounding, sirari is a bolivian hardwood similar to lingue but harder) but was too sweet sounding in my opinion, so I decided to keep the blank and craft another one with a more trebly tone to it, that's the tone the client was looking for.
this was a good neck blank...
individual string saddle, the client asked for a custom string spacing, "similar to a 5 string bass", i will deal with that later, this bridge looks difficult to place, but I'm sure I'm able to.
now here are some pictures that I was talking in another forum post, about working with warped wood.
(Jequitiba)
here is the middle piece of Cumaru, an stringer to make it more rigid and give a bit of its tone
the "warping" was mostly on the edges, you can see in this pic that the warping is quite little actually
So I decided to give it a try and clamp the 3 central pieces first
and maple to the sides then, damn I hate maple for some reason..., it's so expensive and so average in quality compared to my local woods.
working with a 10° sanding jig.
and glued, I need a better way to glue it, the headstock piece slided a bit with the glue clamping procedure.
some passes on the jointer and is good to go.
truss rod channel
43mm bone nut
Headstock design, it will be a reversed headstock with the tuners below, but I designed the "normal" way and then I switch the template for the need I have.
templates go well together, there is quite good synergy between both.
On my first guitar I was very dissapointed on how the tuners aligned with the strings, or how the tuners aligned themselves, now I developed a new technique on how to design and craft a template, now the string pull is straight, the technique to drill the holes will be explained later, here is a test on some pine
so, that's it for now, I'll post some more progress as the proyect unfolds, I didn't post most of the pictures just the relevant ones, the rest are on my facebook with spanish text, if anyone have questions on a certain procedure I can detail it better.
