The Scroll Shop (Ed of H's Shop Thread)

[keith_h]

Here's what Stanley Clarke did to resolve the neck issue. 

http://www.lemurmusic.com/FlyAway-Bass/products/395/

[hankster]

This all puts me in mind of the morning that the neck of my bass simply gently came out of the body of the bass - five minutes before a gig for a bunch of college kids at a local community college in Victoria. I was devastated. I’d only had the bass for a few months - my Roth. Easy fix, as it turned out, and I see from this that it’s a common problem! 

I love  this thread.

[edwardofhuncote]

Fret Mill Music got in some more basses this week that needed setup, which usually involves bridges being recut, restringing, some minor filing on the nut slots... I can usually knock one out in a couple hours. But I had to pull off of the King to get 'em one ready for the storefront this weekend. I'll be back on it later this afternoon and tomorrow. I've been thinking about how to tighten up the neck block, which is part of how this thing got so messed up in the first place. Lateral motion of the neck = BAD. I might be using some epoxy to fill some voids here, but haven't yet solved how to get it where I need it. Sometimes you only get one shot with epoxies, so the prep has to be there, and the clamping apparatus has to work exactly as planned. I'm not there yet. It's all kinds of weird angles, no flat surfaces, so I'll have to make some cauls. In fairness to my customers here, I don't charge them for the amount of time I spend trying to figure out how to fix these things! 

Plus I had one of those days yesterday where ya' know... you can't hit the ground with your hat. It's better to NOT be in the shop, working on tedious stuff on those nights, so I quit early. 

[edwardofhuncote]

There was excitement in the shop today, and not necessarily the good kind... a rare, but scary occurrence; a bandsaw blade broke while I was trimming the feet of a bass bridge. If you ever want to see your music career and livelihood go by in a flash, you will never feel it quite like you do when a 1/4" wide ribbon of hardened steel, 9 - 1/2 feet long and lined with sawteeth snaps while spinning around on two 50 lb. cast iron flywheels. At the moment this happens, your hands are in close proximity. For that matter, the whole dang shop ain't but 12 × 20 feet. Thanks to a couple shop teachers, and especially my Pops teaching me well, I have come to keep in the back of my mind every time I reach for that switch to turn the saw on... this could be the day. This is only the second time ever breaking a blade for me. But all is well. I calmly cut the saw off, and quickly left the building until the flywheels stopped spinning, then came back in and put a new sawblade on my trusty old bandsaw, and finished up the job.

Good opportunity to tell a story. The bandsaw, and several more of my large tools came from a gentleman who my Dad learned to work on instruments from. His name was Jewel Thompson. He built 7 mandolins in his lifetime, and repaired an untold number of local musicians' instruments. He was the guy you called if your guitar or mandolin or fiddle needed work. My Dad was who you called if your banjo was in need. They shared space there since I was a little kid, I guess about 12 or 13 years old when I started taking an interest. Jewel died in September of 1991 after a long fight with cancer, literally carving a new top while on his deathbed for his first mandolin, because its top had failed from being carved too thin... he just couldn't leave it that way. The day before he died, he had Dad and I come empty out his shop and the tools never even cooled off. That Walker-Turner bandsaw has been a fixture in my life for almost 40 years now. I have no idea how long Jewel had it, but he told me once it had come from an old sawmill in Floyd, Virginia.

Anyway... I had a couple days off work for doctor appointments this week, so I figured I might as well spend a few hours up here makin' some fresh sawdust! This Engelhardt EC-1 turned out great after a good setup. It's going back to Fret Mill Music tomorrow morning. I've got my eye on a cute little Martin guitar down there... more on that later. Maybe.

[growlypants]

Now, THAT'S a bandsaw.  I have a little 14" Jet (Hey, who can afford a Delta?!) which is almost 20 years old.  I've never broken a blade, but... sounds scary!!

[David Houck]

Glad no craftspeople were hurt during the incident. 

[cozmik_cowboy]

Allow me to echo Dave's sentiment! 

My grandson taking off the tip of his left middle ringer probably made me cringe more directly - but this kind of thing is more likely to happen to me (or my guitarist/drummer/carpenter son), and so is scarier.

Peter

[edwardofhuncote]

Got a little welcome surprise in the shop last night...

The job is a Chinese upright, one of those first generation ones that came over before the quality hit anywhere near the current standards. I usually hate (well, that's a strong word... let's say dread) seeing these come in, and there seems to be a never-ending supply of them. The necks are awful. The wood was green when they were carved. Most I get in here tend to be a very low grade, amateurish, but serviceable... that's the keyword. I can set them up, and more importantly, get paid to do it. The fingerboards are often warped, dished, grooved, buzzing everywhere if you try to get the action anywhere close to being reasonably easy to play. So I gotta' plane them. Which usually means starting with stripping off the Black Paint of Great Shame. I use some stuff with a lot of warnings on the can to soften it up first, then scrape it off with a skinning knife. Underneath, I expect to find a piece of slab-cut white wood... I've seen maple, poplar, and a couple species of some of the ugliest stuff in the world I couldn't identify. Didn't matter under the paint, of course.

This one was different... it looks a little bit like mahogany, or walnut but doesn't smell, or work up like either one. I wet it with a little acetone in the 3rd picture so you can see the color.

Anybody got a guess?

*the best news is, my customer is okay with me just finishing it out in natural, so I don't have to mask it up and shoot 5 coats of black enamel after I get done getting the geometry right! NICE! I'll have show you all a before/after on this one. 

[edwardofhuncote]

Is it Wenge' maybe? Here it is, clean and dry, ready for oil finish.

Whatever it is, it's pretty stuff, and very straight-grained. Lots of open pores. If I didn't know better I would swear it was walnut, but I know what walnut smells and works like... this ain't it. I don't know what this is.

[glocke]

3rd pic in that previous post that grain reminds me an awful lot of the Wenge that was on Warwick

FYI:  We chatted offline about this a month or so ago...ended up ordering an Upton Standard Laminate!

[edwardofhuncote]

3rd pic in that previous post that grain reminds me an awful lot of the Wenge that was on Warwick

FYI:  We chatted offline about this a month or so ago...ended up ordering an Upton Standard Laminate!

Excellent choice! I guess it must be working out for you then. Post up some pics or other media when you can: http://club.alembic.com/index.php?topic=22703.0.

Upton Bass, for those who haven't heard of them, runs a topnotch bass shop in New England... (Mystic, Connecticut) sales, service, repair, the real deal. https://uptonbass.com/

[glocke]

3rd pic in that previous post that grain reminds me an awful lot of the Wenge that was on Warwick

FYI:  We chatted offline about this a month or so ago...ended up ordering an Upton Standard Laminate!

Excellent choice! I guess it must be working out for you then. Post up some pics or other media when you can: http://club.alembic.com/index.php?topic=22703.0.

Upton Bass, for those who haven't heard of them, runs a topnotch bass shop in New England... (Mystic, Connecticut) sales, service, repair, the real deal. https://uptonbass.com/

Its more or less working out...it's a long, slow process to make progress at this point due to time limitations, and the fact that is a rental bass (SB80) that is not setup well at all and has no adjusters either, but Im committed to making as much progress as I can.  Really its so poorly setup that I can only practice on it for 30 or so minutes at a time before I have to take a break.

[edwardofhuncote]

I finished this one up last night... the mystery wood fingerboard (wenge', or whatever it is) polished up very nice. I rubbed in two coats of finishing wax to seal the pores, and buffed it out. Very happy with the results. Even happier I didn't have break out the rattle-can.

Other than leveling the fingerboard, the biggest job here was reshaping the neck. Like I was saying up-thread, these things were still green when they were cut out, and many of them warped badly as they cured. And they are huge, clubby, clunky necks, sometimes hard to even get your hand around. Now that they've hopefully done all the twisting and pulling that they're going to, no reason not to take a rasp and file to them. This is my favorite part! Nothing fancy about it, just keep shaving and cutting off wood until it feels like a bass neck should - simple. Then smooth out file marks with (progressively;) coarse-grit sandpaper, emory cloth strips, fine-grit sandpaper, and finally ultra-fine grit, followed by steel wool. I like to 'raise the grain' several times with a dampened paper towel. This will fuzz up the wood again, and then you get one more good buffing. The end result is a very smooth surface. (I do this on the fingerboard surface too... actually, sometimes I wet-sand ebony or rosewood with 1200-grit) I use the same Minwax product on the bare wood here as I use on the fingerboards.

One thing you might catch - typical of these basses, this one had a pretty low grade of maple for the neck. Down close to the body, it had a knothole in it. While I was working the neck down, I filled the hole with some CA glue and sawdust filings. Once rubbed out, this neck actually has some nice figure to it, which you can really see 'pop' after having been oil-treated. It plays lightning-fast now, and with a new set of D'Addario Zyex strings installed and the bridge and soundpost recut, nut slots filed, it's ready to go.

Total time, 6 hours. Strings were $150. The bass itself, was a $600 Craigslist find. They'll have about $1200 in it now, which isn't too bad for a decent playing, structurally solid upright.


Now... back to work on the King MorTone!

[growlypants]

I gotta' say...you do some really nice work, Greg!

[keith_h]

That looks very nice. The owner should be really pleased with the results.