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This week's progress:
I have 5 coats of dye on the body and 3 coats on the head face. The differences between the alder body and the maple neck makes it impossible to match the blues, but I have it where I want.
The neck is a quilted maple, so there's a lot of cool grain that I didn't want to saturate with dye.
For the body I wanted an almost midnight blue, but still wanted to see the grain. I applied the dye pretty liberally to get the darkness I was going for.
I've begun to apply my clear coat. So far I have three coats applied to the body and only 2 coats on the neck. I'm only going to apply 3 coats to the back of the neck to keep it as smooth and fast as I can. I'll apply about 8 coats to the head face to get the same luster I want out of the body.
The clear coat application has been tedious. Apply a coat, wait a day for it to dry, the steel wool all the blemishes out. Then repeat.
If I go with 7 or 8 coats, I won't have it done for another week or two.
Apart from some annoying blemishes in the wood, I think it's coming along rather nicely. I can't wait to get this all assembled and finally listen to it.
7 coats of poly. I'm going to stop at 10.
I have stopped at 10 coats of poly.
I've been working from home the past few days, so I've been able to apply 2 to 3 coats a day. I could apply more, but to be honest I'm a little pissed in the blemishes in the wood I let go. So I'm annoyed now at the quality of this thing.
I keep reminding myself this was my first attempt at this, and I need to make these sort of mistakes to improve technique on the next bass I make.
But the perfectionist in me is still upset.
I've also gone ahead and applied three coats of polish. It shines real nice, but I can't get the hairline scratches and foam brush marks completely out. Next bass I plan on building a spray booth in my workshop and spraying the poly on versus brush application.
I'm starting to assemble the electronics today, and hope to put the head all together. Bridge and nut will be the last on the list if I can get around it today.
Pics to come.
I love the color! looks great!
Thanks guys.
The assembly part is extremely stressful for me. I've already put a few scratches in the body that made me want to Crack open the vodka at 11:00 am.
More little annoyances for me now. One of the pot's post is at a slight angle and my knob won't mount flush, so there's a slight wobble with it when I turn it. Nothing you can see really, but I can feel it when I spin it.
Also, one of my pickups is slightly off center. Can't figure out what happened, because when I did a mock up and drilled all my pilot holes everything looked fine.
My wiring kit didn't come with a ground wire, so I improvised and made my own. Hope it works.
I need to start working with the truss rod now to straighten the neck. I'll start making minor adjustments tonight and then start working on getting the nut set and strings on.
Tuning machines are on.
The color is interesting. When it's a little dark it looks purple. As soon as light shines on it, it looks very blue.
I like it.
Adjusting your truss rod to get the neck where you want it uses the tension of the strings in the equation. I wouldn't do much truss rod adjusting until I had the strings on…maybe try to get the neck straight and flat before the strings go on, if it isn't already.
Looks great, Mark! Nice work!
I remember reading somewhere that a neck should be straight before putting strings on.
I think it was on a sheet that came with the neck. I'll try to find it to make super double sure.
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