First built. It may take a while...

[Booooooom]

Catching up on the build diary...

October
When I was happy with the scratchplate template I made an 18mm mdf template so I could rout the final plate. Once routed, the neck pup hole was cut then I toyed with the control positions...

Attachment 29878


Need to make sure they’re in the right place...



similar layout to a ric but I prefer the volume controls closest to the strings.

[Booooooom]

Time to wire up...



I’d like to say that when I fitted the loom to the scatchplate and attached the pups in the guitar that it worked first time... but I’d be lying! Second attempt it did tho!

The only issues were when the switch was selecting both pick ups there was a slight dip in volume and also with both pups selected, when either volume pot was zeroed it killed all sound (below last 10% of travel). I don’t know if that’s to be expected with these components? (I doubt) but the tones were clean and clear and good differentiation between pups.

[Booooooom]

January

Another couple of coats of finishing oil making ten in all then a few applications of renaissance wax have finished the woodwork with a nice satin lustre so it’s time to line the control cavity, scratchplate and both pick up cavities with copper tape. Unfortunately, the pack that I received with the kit was only enough to do about half the job but being the good egg that Adam is, he kindly refunded me a bit to source some locally. Top bloke and thanks again Adam!

[Booooooom]

From the start of the build I’ve been planning the truss rod cover as the supplied one isn’t a particularly good fit and in my opinion isn’t long enough - so I made a new one from an off-cut of the new 3ply scratchplate.

The supplied cover...



And the new one...



There’s more to come on this but I’ll leave that for a later post...

[Booooooom]

FINISHED!

The bass was officially finished on 3rd February 2019... all set up and playing nicely. Thanks for all the advice along the way it was much appreciated. These pics were taken on my phone under some bright but very yellow lights so they've been processed to correct the white balance and desaturate and bleach out my dust sheet!




and I named it...

[Sonic Mountain]

Lovely job all round. Well done.

[Booooooom]

I can't decide whether to fit the pick up cover as I've never played with one on and have hated drilling every hole through the finish! Here's some pics with it in place:




and the whole thing:




A thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding build! I took it to the band rehearsal on Tuesday just 'to have a go on it' and I took my American Fender Precision... the precision didn't get played! The Rhythmplucker is now going to Saturday's gig...

[Sonic Mountain]

Yeah I wonder about those as well. The extra chrome looks cool, but I reckon it'd annoy me to play with. I have a cover for one of my Tele builds and it's never on because it makes it impossible to palm mute.

[Booooooom]

I agree, my thumb naturally sits on the J pup so think it would get in the way.

[Booooooom]

It was a stock RC4 kit build with an Allparts Ric style bridge upgrade and different knobs as I chipped the supplied ones when I first took them off. I had to make a new scratch plate as the supplied one didn't fit once I set the neck in place for a 34" scale length. I made a larger truss truss rod cover from an offcut of scratch plate material with custom 3D printed logo. At every step of the way I found myself buying an new tool or 'thing' – I'll try to list them with a total spend soon. Most probably weren't totally necessary as Ive got a well appointed garage workshop already although most of this build (with the exception of all of the sanding) generally took place on my dining table. The last purchase was a hard case to get it to the gig as all of my other cases didn't fit either the body shape or weren't deep enough to accommodate the angled headstock.