DEAR DIARY:
I wanted a bass and I wanted to make something. I do not have any experience with guitar/bass builds. What I do have is a fair amount of experience in drum building, restoration and finishing/refinishing. I also have access to a good shop and a good selection of tools. This will be fun.
Step 1: Prep work.
Not much to report from the unboxing and the mock build. Issues that needed work:
- Some dents here and there. A really big dent betwen the pickup cavities.
- Uneven sides, curves and rounding.
- Uneven bevel on the pickguard.
This is the big dent. There is a smaller dent as well.
The dents have been filled with wood plaster and sanded smooth.
Sanding. Not too exciting, I know. Being used to hard woods, I went straight for a high powered orbital sander and a P120 disc. That was dumb. I got a medium foam block and gently worked my way from P80 to P600 by hand. Most of the work was done at P400, the P600 was mostly for smoothing out the curves.
Here we have the pickguard. I tried different approaches to the smoothing the bevel and got varying results. The white layer made the unevenness stick out like a sore thumb. I decided on a classic solution; black marker. This is regular marker, later I went over it with a proper acrylic paint marker. Looks good to me.
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