My friend VK approached me about helping her build a working bass as a prop for going to conventions as Marceline the Vampire Queen from Adventure Time.
I had no idea what this was. 🙂 But I was game.
VK is an engineer, so she drew up some plans and printed them out full size.
Step one was to glue up the wood so we had a large enough piece to work with. No pictures of the glue up, use your imagination.
Then we glued the full size print to the wood and cut out the shape on the band saw.
Next VK sanded the outside edge on the belt sander.
And the inside edge on the spindle sander.
After that we cut the taper on the blade edges. We had to make a fixture on the band saw to support the wood at the correct angle, and it took both of us to feed it. I’m not sure why I didn’t take any pictures of that. Oh well. Here is the result.
The next step was to mill out some pockets using my Shapeoko. First on the back were the pockets for the electronics, the 9V battery holder and the neck insert.
Then we milled the neck insert to fit.
We glued in the neck insert and let it dry.
We used the spindle sander to clean up the joints and then ran a 3/8″ R router bit along the top and bottom edges.
After that we used the Shapeoko to mill out the pockets on the front for the pickups and the neck and to put in the holes for the controls.
Here we are test fitting the neck.
We drilled some holes for the straps to attach like so.
After all the woodworking was done VK took the bass home and did all the finishing work. So one last picture of it hanging in her house.
