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fatcat
Not So Newbie
Joined: 21 Apr 2004
Posts: 5
Location: UK
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 Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 11:26 am Post subject: How to make a bass guitar body? |
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I'm decided to make a new body for my bass guitar (from scratch) but have no idea how i would go about it. I need to know what materials to use and how much they are likely to cost.
I will be taking the neck and fittings from my existing bass and i would appreciate any advice on how to do this as well.
Thanks
Fatcat |
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Slapper
Little Guppy
Joined: 23 Feb 2004
Posts: 30
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| Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 5:44 pm Post subject: |
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| Your best bet would be to probably call a local shop, or manufacturer. i.e. Ibanez, Fender, and the like. |
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squidospyder
Newbie Alert
Joined: 22 Apr 2004
Posts: 4
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| Posted: Thu Apr 22, 2004 5:52 am Post subject: Re: How to make a bass guitar body? |
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| fatcat wrote: | I'm decided to make a new body for my bass guitar (from scratch) but have no idea how i would go about it. I need to know what materials to use and how much they are likely to cost.
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Hey i'm new here my 1st post 
I almost wanted to do that once, the thing is you got to decide what material u wan the bass body to be made of 1st. A simple choice would be wood, or if you could fing a big, thick slab of plastic (transparent would be way cool man) it might work. Though i can't say much about the resultant sound, the price of the thing (such a big piece of plastic would definitely have to be expensive) or the ease of machining.
Wood should be fairly easy to find around (furniture factories etc) The bigger concern is selecting woods suitable for musical instruments. Maybe u can check out this page to help u decide http://www.warmoth.com/common/goodwood.htm
That said, Warmoth sells bodies but with your own design for the body it'll probably be costly. Besides its more fun DIY.
Once you get the wood you got to have some amount of technical skill and the tools (router, drills, planes, files and stuff). The design can be as wacky as you want it to be, but you got to leave the wood that runs from the neck pocket to the bridge (the part of the body where the string runs over) intact and make sure its not too thin at this area. Also you got to consider comfort yada yada... Also copy the measurements of the neck pocket and duplicate it exactly for proper fit, and placement of the bridge too (you can find this easily by measuring from nut to 12th fret and multiplying by 2 to get the scale length; then with the neck in the body measure the distance of the scale length from the nut to the body and there's where your bridge saddles are supposed to be when centered along its adjustment range. Hope you get what i mean.)
Pickup placement would be another headache, cos different body woods may have different 'sweet spots' where pickups would sound best due to differences in resonance frequency yada yada... But that's for you to experiment  |
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