I didn't have any time for whittling this weekend, but for good reason - GIGS! Well, that, and spring has finally sprung here so the fifteen things I needed to do around the house won the battle for attention. I did go up to the shop to ponder and sketch for a few minutes. Now that the neck is ready, the next step is the body. Keeping in mind, this old body is work I'm not particularly proud of, being big and chunky, (incredibly heavy) and a wacky shape on top of that. But all that aside, the core is solid walnut, which if I recall correctly was salvaged from an old table. (literally a coffee table bass!) The laminations are maple and walnut, and were mostly decorative, but also provided a way to book and flip-match the wings of the body. It was not my first time ever doing laminations... Dad taught me how to strengthen a banjo neck by laminating a sandwich of alternating wood in between the two bookmatched halves of a neck. On our earlier instruments, this was all the reinforcement we used. Here's a little tease of the next set of installments... a good size pile of scraps on the bandsaw table and a close in look at the body viewed in profile.
