TLB-4 becoming world's 1st Drakensteyn Telemaster Bass

[stan]

Try and work out if the neck pocket isn't flat, or if it's the neck. Gently sand the offender accordingly, it shouldn't need much, go slowly, you'll be fine

[Arzi]

Nice buy Alfons. Have been drooling that bass myself. It's a nice canvas to paint your own art on.

I can recommend the SD scpb-3. I put it on my p51 build some time ago and it rocks.

[Alfons.Groenland]

Mockup build #3: mount the bridge, replace the nut, mill the pickup pockets


It's been a while, but a lot happened. With the neck in place, the bridge is mounted to the body. Simply by aligning to the center of the neck and the 2 outer strings for position, at a distance of 34" (864mm) for the G string in max out position.
Attachment 13463
Once screwed down, I replaced the standard nut by a cream graphtech version. For that, the slot had to be widened, job done in half an hour of filing with a side only file, increasing the gap towards the head while keeping the depth as equal as possible.


Next, the toughest job till now: milling the pickup pockets.
Never used a top down mill before, borrowed one from a friend and started testing on some dummy wood. Decided to go for the template route, designed pickups in CAD, added margin for the router guide and got them laser cut out of some PMMA plate (in fact, 2x 5mm to make the required 9mm of the router guide).
In the design, pickup posititions for the MM Humbucker and 51p-SC are the same as for the original basses, the Cabronita HB is shifted a few mm and fits nicely in between the other two.


Next, tested in on some spare piece of wood, verified the templates were OK and finally today got time to get them milled out of the body.
51P and cabronita HB were pretty easy, the MM humbucker required 2 templates (one rectangular and one for the 'ears').

Basswood is pretty nice for someone with marginal wood experience, quite soft (but not too soft), got the job done in a few hours (pretty much the same as aligning masks in microtechnology, my day job :-))


Worked out nice I think, next added some channels for all the wires and made a 4th pocket for the 9V battery for powering the active electronics.


Furthermore, I designed the electronics, including a new control plate and pickguard. More on that later...

Very happy so far and great joy!

[Dedman]

wow, you are going to have some interesting sounds available

[billb]

Very interesting!

[Drummerdude]

This will be on of my next builds for sure.. looking good and can't wait to see it progress. Nice work so far.

[elcodyloco]

That's one mess of a pickup combo. If it sounds as wild as it looks, I'm stoked to see the end result!