The glued parts of the omega that Mica mentioned are the inner part of the open end of the omega. When they assemble a through-body instrument, you start with the neck/body center section which are long single pieces of wood (maple+purpleheart or ebony) that run from the nut to the end. If you have a point, the pointed part is that same piece of wood.
If you have an omega, then there's a cutout at that end of the instrument. The circular cut completely removes a region of the center section. Most of the inside perimeter of the omega is the body wings which shows of the laminate sandwich. The tips of the omega are left over from the center section, so those little areas are held on only by the glue joint down there.
Making an instrument is sort of a series of steps where the cost of screwing up keeps getting higher and higher as you go along (since any screw up down the line may lead to the instrument being scrapped, hence losing all the work up to that point). Making a through-body instrument is already hard because there's always the danger that a body operation may screw up the neck or vice versa. The omega cut is getting up into the high difficulty area because it's not done until the instrument is fairly far along in production - the neck and body wings have been joined, etc. If you slip or crack the top or back, there's no turning back (I guess you'll be looking at a bigger omega!).
I have the first stinger omega which was the result of drawings back and forth between Alembic and I, years ago. I liked the heart omega and the point, and this created a sort of mix of the two (the stinger comes out to where a point would be). You really have to be confident when you're doing this, since the slightest error will destroy it.
As hard as that might be, the hardest thing to do must be the LED side marker routing. My understanding is that this is the last step done before finishing, which means construction on the instrument is largely completed, and the slightest error here really is death. They have to shoot a narrow parallel-sided route down the side of the neck which is constantly changing in terms of size and curvature. If you slip and screw up during inlaying, then you change the inlay to cover up the error. If you slip on the side of the neck, good luck trying to hide it.
If building a bolt-on assembly line bass is like flying an airplane, building a through body is like flying upside down. Cutting the omega is like flying under the Golden Gate Bridge. By the time you're at stinger omegas and LED side markers you're flying under the Golden Gate bridge upside down at the speed of sound!
David Fung
