Guild epiphany and bass making

I'm covering a couple days of small stuff here.

First, I did some work with the Guild D35 neck.

I tried heating the neck to get some of the epoxy out.

Well, I got some of the epoxy off, and charred part of the neck, and this is all really terrible.

Fact is, that truss rod is pressed in really tightly, and I just don't know what the best way is to get it out.

So, after all this hemming and hawing, and really wasting some time - I'm going to use the donor neck after all. It makes NO sense to do anything else. It will look fine, and it will work well. I need to make some tweaks to make it fit well, but it is a perfectly good neck to use for this purpose, and I'm not sure what I was thinking when I decided not to use it.

On to another topic -


My friend Ray has had a bass building project on his back burner for about 10 years. He has all the parts, but hasn't had the kick in the pants to get it done. I am born to kick pants, so we are getting started! And, while we're at it, I'm making one for myself. They will both be 5 string fretless basses. Ray's with have super-fancy Lightwave pickups, and mine - well, I'm not sure yet, I guess we'll see as we go along.

We've done some work already - ripping a beautiful curly piece of maple into four sections, and choosing a really neat piece of walnut in my stash for a center wedge - at least, we thought it was really neat until we cut it open, exposing a tremendous number of cracks and knot holes. Oh well - it was a nice thought.

So, today we went, bought a very nice piece of walnut, and I assembled a jig to cut wedges from it.

This is the jig on it's side, with clamps holding the walnut board in place.

This is the other side. The light colored strip rides in the miter slot of the saw, and the extra piece of plywood is hot-glued in place to help balance the rather large chunk of walnut as it goes through the saw. It worked beautifully - table saw sleds are a joy to work with!

This is the walnut wedge with two pieces of maple on the side. This will act as the neck and central pillar of the body of the bass. 

There has also been much shopping for supplies, experimenting with tools, and other learning curve stuff. We are ready to move forward tomorrow.