Okay, another one! This one has been around for quite a while. I started making it after my first ever build about six years ago but somehow got busy and never finished.
The body is modelled on a Rickenbacker 4001. The thing is, I’ve never like the upper rear bout of that shape, so I rounded it off in my version – it’s kind of a cross between a Rick front end and a Gibson Ripper backend! It’s made from two pieces of rock maple (front and back) with a pine (yep, pine!) core. The idea was that a fully solid maple body would have weighed a ton, but this way I was able to rout out a fair chunk of pine in the middle to keep it light. I bought the MM-style pickup so long ago I can’t remember what it is, and originally I was thinking about a mini pickguard...
... but then I made a maple cover for it and decided I wanted to do away with knobs entirely and wire the pickup directly to the jack (I may need to experiment with capacitors to avoid it being too hot but this will be a simple one indeed!). I also have a Mighty Mite maple J-bass neck for it. And that’s where I kinda stopped.
Yesterday I got cracking again - it was a building kinda day. First step was to take all the tools out on to the deck and to get the neck on.
I need to do a bit of fixing around the neck pocket – it’s a fraction wide so I’ll glue in some shims and then sand back to fit but I decided to forge ahead and screw it in place so I could I drill and mount the bridge. I also needed to do a bit of work around the heel to make the shape flow a bit better. With that done I set to routing the pickup cavity. I made a template and measured things up.
It worked really nicely – given I haven’t used the router in anger for a while. I also drilled a hole to connect a ground for the bridge - although I had to do it twice as I screwed up the first time!
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