Sunday, July 15, 2012

Final Sanding and Cleaning of Neck

Once we discovered that the bass can not only be a project bass but a beautiful one as well, the decision was made to sand the finish of the entire piece. Here are the final pictures of what was underneath all that varnish.




As you can see the wood is amazingly beautiful underneath and should look fantastic with a new stain and coloring. 

Neck Removal and Cleaning of Fingerboard

I was so exhausted after the work we did yesterday I could not post all the photos of what we accomplished. Here are the remainder of the photos and comments.



When we removed the neck, we decide to keep the bracing block attached for the moment so as not to cause damage to the neck frame or fingerboard. I want to keep the original tuners and will need to clean them up so they came off next.




After carefully removing the bracing block, we found the dovetail fully intact, which will probably help us in attaching it to a new maple body.


We separated the neck from the body and wanted to see how the finger board and neck would look without the finish and paint. The fingerboard was fully painted with a several layers of clear coat and it took a long time to sand off. We discovered that the neck and fingerboard are both made of maple, so this makes everything else nice and easy for this project. Final pictures of the fully sanded and cleaned pieces in the next post.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Started work

We started work this morning by separating the neck of my old upright from the body. This took a long time but we wanted to be careful and salvage every piece we thought we might need. Everything went off without too much difficulty an we are both pleased with the end result.

Here are the photos of the removal process and what the remainder of the frame.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

It begins

Well it finally started yesterday. Gary and I picked up a 3ft chunk of soft maple for the body of the build and we begin work on Saturday. After looking at some of the designs out there, we are defiantly going to utilize the remainder of my old Englehardt upright and cannibalize it for the EUB, mainly the neck and fingerboard which are maple and rosewood respectively. I have a few extra bridges left over from my symphony days in college. At the very least I believe we have enough to begin construction and work!

I'm so totally pumped about this!

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Press any key to start

So I am starting a project I meant to begin roughly six years ago. The idea was to salvage what was left of an upright acoustic bass and convert it into an electric upright bass. The process should not take too long and GB and I will learn a tremendous amount from the experience. This blog is setup to document the process and post ideas and more importantly images for myself as well as the folks over at TalkBass.com.

Let's see how this goes.