Thundering Forward...

Back to work!!! Its Tbird time!

How I ended up making the truss rod work. Basically I flipped it over so that I could leave as much wood under the adjuster as possible. Im going to do them all this way from now on.

On to drilling the fretboard for side dots.

Installing the dot filler rods

...and done

Clamping the fretboard down for glue up. I reused the same jig from the firebirds a while back.

Glued on!

Then it was time to start shaping the neck. First I started with roughing in the heel.a

From there it was time to start roughing in the neck. Since Dave wasn't in the shop today there aren't any action shots but the process was the same as doing the firebirds again.

Knocking the edges off.

The EB3 provides inspiration for the neck shape. This has got the greatest half-baseball-bat chunky C neck ever.

Steve doing a little tweaking to the heel after I shaped the neck itself.

FRIGGIN AWESOME! The neck profile is spot on.

Third time's a charm...

I think I should start this post... third time's a charm.

So yes, its been quite a while since I've posted an update. There is a reason for this. Just as we were getting ready to try machining I notice a problem. Because the I left the walnut strips wider than how I originally intended I found a problem down the road. I started laying drawing a fullsized mockup and realized that I spaced the walnut strips out to far... they'd run right out the sides of the neck about half way down.

DOH

So I debated and decided to just cut the outter strips out and reglue. So I cut it apart and realized that the strips were slightly skewed anyways (though its possible I skewed it when I ran them across the table saw).

When I realized that I just threw them in the firewood pile and started gluing up a new neck section. I just used 2, 1/4" wide walnut strips this time and made SURE they would be INSIDE the neck width. Joe and I had talked and we both agreed that we would rather have less pieces of Walnut if they were wide enough to actually DO something.

So off I went, glued up another nice laminated neck. Nice and long to give me plenty of material to chop the headstock section out to scarf joint ect ect.

Awesome right? Nope here's where murphy strikes again. Pulled it from the clamps, let it sit for while I worked on other stuff. Came back a few days later to put the wings on and I do a double take... the last foot and half had decided to twist nearly an inch to the right!

UGHHHHH. Cut that one back apart and threw the entire thing into the firewood pile.

SO this week I just started from scratch. Went and picked up more mahogany and started completely over. This time I took a bit different approach and relaminated the neck section nearly an inch wider than I needed. Formed a jig on the bench to make sure when I clamped that this thing would stay true. Now I should mention that I've always made my laminations with alternating grain directions and spend A LOT of time doing this. Every one of them has been as stable as a rock... just had a lot of visits from Murphy on this poor bass.

Then I worked it through planer and then widebelt till it was the width I needed. THIS FINALLY worked! Straight as could be, the walnut strips are with in a 1/64 true all the way down 80* of laminations... finally.

On better news though, I did get to run the mockup and it came out PERFECT! Should be seeing the real deal roll off the CNC by end of the weekend.

I sacked up and put the actual blank on the CNC and this is the result.

Came out great!

Thunderbird...

Joe's Thunderbird blank sanded to thickness. Sure is gonna be purdy

Thunderbird...

Just a quickie. Got the wing blanks glued onto Joes Thunderbird today. As cold as it is right now the squeeze out takes quite a while to dry... might not get sanded till thursday.

Building Joe's Thunderbird

As I mentioned in an earlier post Im building a Thunderbird for a friend of mine.

Started with a large blank of lightly skimmed African Mahogany.

Joe's is a little more involved since he wanted to do the Walnut strips like the Gibson's have. So I cut the mahogany into strips and grabbed some Walnut to do the neck section.

Here she is all glued up. Next things to do are chop the headstock out of it, attach the blanks to form the wings and sand it all to thickness. Then it'll be time to go on the cnc machine!