Slappin' together da IB-5 mon!

[wazkelly]

I think the logo style and placement is spot on.

Agree and probably as is where the vinyl sticker provides just a tiny tactile element.

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[Sonic Mountain]

Looking really good.

[michnet76]

Thanks Sonic Mountain and wazkelly...

I have gone with the thick vinyl decal.

I took the first one off and prepared another one, this time I gave it a light coat with some sepia modelling wash just to darken it up a tad to better match the tone of the maple neck. I applied some thin CA glue around the edges just to make sure it stays in place.

I had already done 4 coats of wipe on poly - reasonably thin coats, wipe on-wipe off and have now finished it off with 2 coats of aerosol satin polyurathane. I'll let it cure for 3-4 days and give it a rub back with some 0000 steel wool to smooth it out and give it a nice matted sheen.





In the meantime I'll get back to the neck and make a start on fret levelling/crowing/polishing.

[wazkelly]

Looks good.

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[michnet76]

Making progress...

The final coat of poly is drying well, after 24 hours it was completely dry to the touch - thought it would still be a bit tacky in this cooler weather, although I've kept it inside in a spare room where it's a bit warmer. I won't give it a final rub down till maybe Sunday night (4 days after final coat). Poly can take up to 30 days to fully cure and harden so it'll still be a bit soft for a while and will need to handle with care!

Last night I painted two coats of conductive paint in the pup and control cavities...

[Andyxlh]

This looks superb. The grain is amazing and your body logo looks very professional, well done.

[michnet76]

Thanks wazkelly and Andyxlh!

Some more pics and progress updates from the weekends effort...

Saturday arvo I spent a few hours getting the neck as straight as I could and levelling, recrowing and polishing the frets. The neck definitely does have an in consistent bow between the bass and treble side. I get the bass side dead flat and the treble side has around .3-5mm concave bow to it and vice versa get the treble side flat and the bass becomes slight convex and the straight edge rocks back and forth - I adjusted it to around half way between and levelled the frets - figured I'd take a little more off the frets in the centre region on the bass side and little more off the higher and lower frets on the treble sides - seems to have helped as I'm not getting any significant fret buzz on the B string and action is set up just about bang on. the D/G strings need further adjustment but I'll get to that further in my post...



Yesterday afternoon I gave the body a light wet rub with 800 grit to smooth it all over then a thin coat of carnauba wax brought back a consistent satin sheen to it. Pretty happy with the results.

Then it was on to installing the pups and wiring, pretty straight forward there - I used all the supplied pots and caps. I may swap them out along with better pups down the track perhaps if I end up liking this bass and can get it set up decently.



The neck was installed next along with the bridge and strings then spent the rest of last night working on the setup. It's at the point it's playable and might drag it along to band practice tonight just to see how it holds up and sounds through a bass amp (I don't have one yet). Got the nut just about dialled in and quite happy with the action on the B/E/A strings but I'm out of saddle height adjustment (low) on the D/G string due to the extra relief in the neck on the treble side. I'll pull the neck and play around with shimming it to start with and may end up reprofiling the bottom of the neck perhaps when I put a decent set of strings on it in the coming weeks. I'm not hugely concerned if the D/G strings aren't setup perfectly though, I rarely play on G string and D to an extent - the whole purpose of wanting to build this bass was to have the 5th B string for certain songs so as long as the B/E/A strings are set up well I'm content.

I was a little surprised when it came time to intonate - I ended up having to adjust the saddles quite a fair way back, there's still a few mm left aft but it's further back than I'd like. The bridge could have been mounted back another 5mm. But in my experience with guitars, different strings can have quite an affect on the intonation adjustments required and can imagine the adjustments for a bass would be exponential so I'll reserve my conclusions until I've had a chance to string it up with a decent set of strings.

As for plugged in - as mentioned I don't have a bass amp at home so won't know for sure yet, but just plugging into an old guitar amp (at low volume!) it all seems to work correctly except the signal is about half the signal strength of my Yamaha RBX bass which has a passive PJ set up... I double checked to make sure there was nothing grounding out and I'm satisfied the wiring is all correct - went around with the multimeter to check everything and it all checks out. I temporarily wired a pup directly to a spare output jack and it was the same - I think these stock pups are just very weak. I'll suss it out more tonight when I get a chance to plug it into a proper bass amp and see how it all sounds.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out - with some more tweaking with the neck and setup in general I think it'll be a keeper!









I'll take some better pictures soon when I get a chance!

[wazkelly]

Low pup output could also mean pups are sitting a bit too low in the body.
I had these pups in my EX5 and thought they were weak and low in volume but after spending best part of $250 on upgraded units i discovered combination of high action and low pup height were largely responsible.
Their resistance specs are encouraging. Unfortunately not too many upgrade options other than passive or active EMG's, bartoloni, seymour duncan, or custom bensons as i chose which sound awesome.
Suggest raising them a bit and to place some high density foam underneath to act as an additional spring effect. Hopefully that gives you more output to play with before pulling the trigger on replacements.
Cheers, Waz


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[michnet76]

Yeah I thought the same thing re pup height... Initial test I had them sitting fairly low and the signal was very weak - I had my little amp cranked full volume and barely got any signal so raised them to what I would consider normal playing height - on a guitar at least (fret at the last fret and just enough room for the top string to vibrate freely). It boosted the output quite a bit but even after adjustment still only about half the output strength of the Yammy.

Yeah I picked up the tip re foam packing from another thread on here! Forums like this are a treasure trove of info if you take the time to look for it

[wazkelly]

I have a Yammy fiver and they do have a lot of grunt compared to a lot of other guitars. A good comparison would be a Jazz Bass as they are not usually noted for high output either.

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