Building a Custom Electric Bass from SCRATCH

hey everyone welcome back to my channel xyla here and i have this really big problem that i'm hoping you guys can help with and it is that my new shop is beautiful and wonderful and i love it and it is way too clean okay so i've been trying to come up with an excuse to build an instrument for a really long time i realized at some point in the last couple months that i don't need an excuse i can just do it so um instead of making a really simple like solid body base the way a normal person would i decided to make my life really hard and i designed this monstrosity this video was graciously sponsored by kiwico more on them at the end of the video i don't know why but this design pretty much down to every curve popped into my head at a jacob collier concert where he was like sitting on a park bench playing the base and i really liked it so here we are [Applause] [Music] anyway before i get copyright strike for that one let's actually get started so here i'm laser cutting out the templates for my first forms and so these two curves are the interior curves that of that shape that i designed so i cut them out on the laser cutter cleaned them up a little bit and then traced them onto the plywood that i'll use to actually make the forms now what you're seeing here is a wild xyla in the wild exhibiting a common behavior called fansaw laziness and that is when you don't change the blade of your bandsaw from a resaw blade to the quarter inch blade that's sitting like three feet away and as a result it takes forever to cut all these curves because you're lazy anyway i eventually got that done and went to the classic masking tape and super glue trick to get a template onto a form so once that was glued on i just took it over to a trim router bit on my router table and then i can just peel the template right off and keep going and what keep going means is i'm going to repeat that process over and over again just gluing the now routed plywood to a piece that needs to be routed because i need this to be two and a half inches thick so that's three uh three quarter inch pieces of plywood glued together and keep in mind there's four of these that i'm doing so it can take quite a while but luckily i learned some magic tricks along the way the avatar may be the master of all four elements but can he bend wood i think not so i will teach you to become a wood vendor it's it's actually pretty simple you just need to make a steam box okay if you actually want to learn how to make a steam box i ended up throwing it together a video on my brandy new second channel um and so you can go watch it there i'll link it down in the description below otherwise we're gonna move on to the really important part of this which is that i asked twitter to name my brand new steam box as i was working on it all right it's been an hour and the twitter poll has ended and obviously stevie mcsteambox won but second place was steambox willy and i think that's hilarious and also adorable and because this is complete anarchy and there is no one here to physically stop me uh i think i'm gonna do steam box willie i even printed him out and i'm gonna stick them on all right steam box willie is done and that means it's time to rip down some ash and test her out oh and for thin strips like this you need to use feather board if you don't i will call your mother and i will tell on you all right i'm gonna brag for a second that is like perfect they are exactly the same yeah okay i'm sure that there are going to be people watching this video who are better than me but at least for me no matter how many times i've steam bent something it takes me a couple tries to figure out what the process is for this specific project so i pretty much always get like double the amount of wood that i need because i know i'm gonna break a bunch of pieces and the other thing that i've found is that like regardless of the wood you're using in the guy like if you google how long you should steambend each type of wood take that number and check it out and just steam it for as long as you can all right it is day two of steambox willie i came in at like 8 30 this morning and popped these pieces of wood in there and then i went to the dentist and it's now noon um so let's see how it goes okay so the problem that i run to here is that the outside of the curves crack and that's really hard to solve without a compression strap and the problem is because this is s-shaped i can't have a compression strap on on both sides so i decided to just cut my pieces a little thinner this means that instead of doing one solid piece i'm now going to do a bentwood lamination which in a lot of ways is actually just stronger and better and because i'm gonna keep my pieces of wood matched up as close as i can it's still gonna look like one solid piece of wood when you're cutting really thin strips like this be really really careful use push sticks and use a feather board so with the cut pieces lined back up all neatly i just cut them down and now i'm going to bend them the exact same way and for anyone new around here how steam bending works is basically the steam softens lignin which is you can think of it like the glue that holds all the strands of cellulose that make up wood together and so when it's soft you can bend it but then when it cools the lignin re-hardens and once i had gotten both shorter pieces successfully bent after several attempts i decided i was ready to go for the big outer piece and not only that i decided i was ready to go for the big outer piece as one really long piece of wood that wraps all the way around instead of two separate pieces so i threw it in cad sent it to the laser cutter and made a template the exact same way that i did the other ones also and aside from voice over xyla of the future if any of you are crazy enough to want to try this yourself i've listed all of these templates on ebay because honestly i'm cleaning up that i want them out of my shop i'll drop a link in the description and then with my three sheets laminated together and routed i went to the hole saw and just took out big chunks and the idea here is i need something to clamp to and with the form ready for something to wrap around it it was time to cut down the strips for the main section of the base [Music] you know what's funny does anyone remember this moment oh the breaker someday i'll have a real shot please support me on patreon that's all i asked because now i have a real shop and i'm still blowing the breaker on the bright side i have now determined where on my completely unmarked electrical panel uh the front of the garages anyway with that little adventure behind us which took like an hour for the record i was able to finish cutting down my strips and move on to bending i pondered for a while on how i was going to secure this mold to any kind of surface and then i finally decided to disassemble a couple t-track clamps and repurpose them by drilling two holes down the middle of the form like such and with the form ready to go it was time for the scariest part of this whole project thus far uh bending the like five foot long piece of ash and this was really difficult the ash i had had steaming for probably eight hours or so it was most of the day and then um it was still like a full body i was actually sore the next day from doing this and you can see in some spots me using a clamp to clamp the other clamps because it was so difficult to get all that tension ah i did it okay check this out my hands are throbbing my body hurts i um this was like a ton of physical labor there's a couple imperfections but those will come out in the wash those will get fixed in the glue up so for the most part we have the shape of our base oh okay i'm going to bed bye and with everything successfully bent it was just time to glue all the laminations together and since everyone always asks about glue i'm just using normal wood glue it's the most invisible option for a use case like this once there was a super generous coat on all faces i stacked it all back up and popped it back in the clamp and back in the vise and so i want it to get glued together in the mold as well so that it is like a perfect perfect shape and since the vice was being taken by the other one when i glued the shorter one up i decided to just clamp it directly onto one half and that was fine and the big glue up was exactly the same just bigger and honestly a little more satisfying and this is one of those things that can be easy to forget but when you're gluing things up remember to masking tape off your forms otherwise you'll have one object at the end [Music] [Music] all right so i got this wildly beautiful piece of purple heart for christmas this year and i'm thinking that it looks like a base and it should be a base but i've never worked with purple heart before wish me luck i'm excited first things first i cut my templates out on the laser cutter and then i turned the piece over to the bandsaw to cut it down to size all right i got a bone to pick with all of you who are watching this video who didn't warn me that purple heart is the worst wood ever why is it so bad i don't care that you're watching this like two years after i posted this video someone should have told me that it is it's it's it's oily it gets everywhere it turns your snot purple it dulls your blades it breaks your bits it tears out worse than like a gross crusty scab and not only that it smells like farts what a scam man i could have bent this ash with the steam coming out of my ears i didn't realize it was so penned up in there anyway uh it was time to trim the ash down and then move on to routing purple heart i hugged out the first chunk of material using a forstner bit in my drill press which is pretty normal and then it was time to take a follow bit on my router to the template which was actually my first time doing this and it's incredibly nerve-racking and i um i learned some things and i am by no means a perfect person and this is exhibit a i was sort of drawn on showing this but i think it's really important to show that like i don't get everything right on my first try either so if you screw something up everything is fixable and you should not worry about it at all so anyway i repeated the process through the pickup pockets so there's the neck pickup and the bridge pickup all right so i maybe had some hiccups with the neck pocket but these pickup pockets look quite good and by some stroke of pure genius i actually remembered to center punch the screw holes for the bridge before i took the template off amazing and then with the template off i could go in and deepen that neck pocket to its final depth next i have to go in and make a pocket for the spoke wheel of the truss rod so there's a couple different types of truss rods which is how you adjust tension in the neck and the one that i have has a small wheel at the bottom that you can kind of stick a poker in and adjust it on the fly so this is a really easy way for players to be able to adjust the tension of the neck themselves without having to go to a luthier but it does mean you have to carve out this little spot and here we're also gonna get a little glitch in the matrix so you're not watching this in the chronicle chronological order that i was making it i was basically working on all pieces concurrently but in the edit it made no sense so um just pretend you didn't see that neck and that we haven't made it yet i had to slip up at the router and i nicked the side so i've been carefully shaping this piece that's got a grain match to to glue in there now some may call her bold and some may call her crazy but after carefully cutting out the entire base i decided to just absolutely wing it on the cavity so i just free handed it in masking tape and then drilled thin pilot holes all the way through and then the area where the um the pots are gonna stick up through the top quarter inch of the wood i went in with the size forstner bit that fit those pots and then on the back i used that same pilot hole to just drill like very large holes where the rest of the pot will fit and it it worked pretty well ah no regrets mostly and then to make space for the rest of the electronics i just went in and drilled some other holes and so this is kind of what the back cavity ended up looking like although i did connect those two holes and i don't think i got it on camera and then i went in and i also not only did i remember to center punch those screw holes i remembered to drill them too [Music] and with the main body of the base done at least that center purple heart piece i don't even know what to call it it was time to give everything a preliminary sanding before i assembled it because once it's assembled it's way harder to stand so i just went through hit everything with some 120 and then some 220 and got to putting it together i opted for a combo of screws and epoxy because i didn't really trust either one alone um so for each point where the ash meets the purple heart i tried to get at least one screw in there and then also epoxy the joint and the epoxy also helps with just general gap filling because it's not perfect but a little bit of ash sawdust mixed into the epoxy helped blend the two together really nicely [Music] now one of the lessons i learned really early on and yet i still had to just keep learning it over and over again is that purple heart will eat your drill bits for breakfast and then wash it down with broken screws for lunch so as you can see here i pilot drilled and then drove the screw in like normal and after i hammered in the plug i realized that when screwing the screw in it had actually shattered the screw inside so i had to go in and do it again and this time and for all holes going forward i realized that i have to drill the pilot hole a lot bigger in purple heart than any other wood [Music] also you want to talk about plugs on hard mode angled plugs let me tell ya it's it's a different beast [Music] and with the inner pieces secured and on i gave it a quick sand before attaching the outer one again because it's easier to sand without that outer piece on yet and then i use the exact same method for the long piece and for epoxy i have and for epoxy i am of course using bottle tote for mix [Music] i will say it's pretty satisfying to watch those plugs disappear i laser cut the shape that i wanted for the back cavity cover plate out of the same ash that i used on the sides of the guitar so it'll match really nicely and then i traced it on and freehand routed it although i did have to remove that screw head so the router wouldn't hit it which was kind of terrible but made it work and then while i got really close with the router i did go in and just do a little bit of cleanup work at the end with a dremel and then mostly a lot of cleanup work with my chisels and even though it's a non-traditional design i still wanted to go for the traditional wing shape of the base so i carved out the contours mostly with my arbortech power carver and also a little bit of a belt sander and an orbital sander just to get that like really swoopy shape and then i went in with my cutest little spindle zander head and sanded the wingtips flush next i popped a round over a bit into my router and just went through and smoothed over all of the hard corners and obviously i did my best but with the inside corners i couldn't get there so i did have to do those by hand oh and then sanding and more sanding and more sanding it honestly it hurts my soul how much sanding i have to edit out of videos because i don't think you guys realize how much sanding i do or like appreciate the fact that i have wasted most of my 20s just sanding stuff oh you thought i was done absolutely not i am never done sanding psych but this time i won't actually make you watch much of it you're welcome and then the last thing to do on the body before moving on to the neck is just drill the holes for the screws and the pockets for the ferrules that will hold the neck on and somehow it's time to move on to the neck so for the neck i did the template very similarly that i did the body i laser cut out of really thin mdf a template that i could use to make my template um i didn't want to go straight to a full template with a piece that had been cut in half so i assembled it together and then used this to make my real template and for anyone who thinks this is ridiculous or overkill let me tell you that the piece of terrified maple i'm about to make this neck out of was it's sent to me by snoomac but was like a 300 piece of wood so i wanted the most solid template that i could possibly have before i cut the neck out though it's easier to route the channels for the truss rod and the carbon fiber stiffening rods ahead of time so that you can use an edge guide on the router so i found the center line of the template and then found where i want it to sit on the wood making sure that that center line is parallel to an edge so that i can use that edge glide and then i went in and routed the channels and then i could cut it out also a lot of you guys noticed it's been a couple months since my last upload and the lat this whole year honestly but the last couple months in particular have been really rough i had a bunch of medical issues i got covered and then my landlord tented my house for fumigation and then it got burgled and then i had more medical issues so a huge thank you to my patrons for providing me with like the only job security that i have um and for honestly just getting me through the last couple months so if you'd like to join my patreon it gets you access to my discord my monthly patreon zooms and some other benefits like early videos and long cuts of videos anyway getting off my little soapbox here with all three channels routed i squared up the ends of the ones for the carbon fiber stiffener rods with a small chisel and then i was ready to head over to the bandsaw and just cut the whole thing out [Music] to fit the truss rod i just placed it into its channel and then sort of carefully penciled around the area where the spoke wheel interfered with the wood and took my chisels to it and made its own little pocket once it fit nice and snug i glued my template back on and took it back over to the trim router for final shaping [Music] and while i was over there i thinned the headstock a little bit as well next i mixed up some total boat four minute epoxy and there is a code for i think 10 off down in my description below um and i used that to glue the carbon fiber stiffener rods in and what these do is just give the neck some more strength um bases and guitars and honestly all string instruments are under a huge amount of tension and this will basically just help ease some of that from the wood once that was cured i marked and then loosely cut out the ebony for the fingerboard and i will admit to using a pre-slotted fingerboard that's the only like pre-made thing i used um and i had all good intention to use a just an ebony blank um but with kovid and my production schedule shifting i decided this would be like easier and faster uh i still fretted it myself so shush and while everything else on the fingerboard will get trim routed later the little like tongue that overhangs the body actually won't so it was important to shape that correctly now before gluing the fingerboard on it's important to mask off the area where the truss rod sits so you don't accidentally glue the truss rod to the fingerboard and for this i used normal wood glue i totally forgot to move the camera the justice that i glued the fretboard on and um look how many nice clamps i have big happy hours uh anyway uh i'm gonna go to bed so i've had this really fun thing for the last couple weeks called covid19 i can tell i'm moving slower and i'm getting things done slower and i'm making decisions slower which sucks so i'm trying to be nice to myself i don't like not operating at 100 with the glue very dry i pulled all the clamps off and trim routed the fingerboard to the neck and then it was time to mentally prepare myself for my workout of the day at like the week actually which is shaping the neck i started by just carving a straight channel to the thickest point of the neck and so this is gonna be like my reference on each side for all of the planing and then i hand planed all of that material off like i did it all by hand i swear i what is i don't i don't know what this is um i i deny it i hand planed the whole thing yeah bring this back exude i did this this was the whole time anyway once it was meticulously hand planed down i drew a center line and then i bisected my center line and then i drew kind of a mid line down each side of the neck um and then using a hand plane for real this time i um took that angle off and i kind of just did that all the way around the neck and i genuinely only used a hand plane and a spokeshave and a little bit of a rasp shaping the neck because i didn't want a power tool to potentially dig a little bit too deep and expose one of the carbon fiber rods or worse the truss rod and then once i was happy with the shape of the neck it was time to tackle the headstock and the heel and so i did both of those with a rasp it was just easier to kind of go for the shape that i had in my head and then while i was at it i decided to drill the holes for the tuning pegs and i thought the easiest way was just to print out my cad model um in proper sizing and then use an awl to transfer the holes over and so i pilot drilled them with a skinny bit and then i went in with the forstner bit and drilled them out to size and the pilot hole is important because you can't take the forstner bit all the way through the wood or you might risk tearing out the wood on the back so you can only go in halfway from each side so this is how you line it up and because i like to make my life as difficult for myself as possible i designed in this little cutout in the headstock in the end i'm really glad i did it but it was a massive pain in the ass so i basically had to take this little coping saw and like carefully cut out the shape and then sanding and filing inside of it was a nightmare but we did it it looks cool so yeah for the fretboard inlays i just drew x's to find the center of the little box that the inlay is going to go in and then i center punched them drilled them out and ca glued the little pearl dots in the side inlays were pretty much the same except with this tiny little flimsy plastic rod that was very nerve-wracking to work with to shape the fretboard i used this 16-inch radius block from stumac and it's basically just got the radius of the fingerboard machined into it which is so nice so i just stuck i started with 80 grit sandpaper i believe and then worked my way all the way to like a thousand grit remember when i said i spent my 20s sanding yep this is what i meant imagine if you were the one doing this except it wasn't at 10 000 speed with the fingerboard surface super smooth and really nice it was time to prep the slots for fretting so i went through and carefully cleaned all the sawdust out of each slot and then i used a refretting saw to open up the slots just a little bit more particularly at the tops so the frets will hammer in really nicely to hammer the frets in i started by placing each fret gently over the slot and then hammering one side in and then hammering the other side in and then slowly working my way over the arch and this works for two reasons one is that the bottom of the fret you'll see has got barbs on it so that will grab the wood really nicely and the other is that the frets are pre-radiused to a radius that's a little bit tighter than the fingerboard itself so once it's in it kind of grabs in and when i was done hammering the frets in i took fret snips which are basically diagonal cutters except they sit perfectly flush to the edge of the material and snipped all the ends of the frets once snipped i took the stumac fret leveling file and for the record stump sent me everything for this video and also through a bunch of affiliate links to all of the tools that they sent me down the description below so if you're curious you're welcome to check that out um but i took the leveling file and i filed the ends and down to basically down to the wood got it all super smooth and once it was nice and smooth i turned it 45 degrees and sort of angled the frets in a little bit as well with the fretboard up at an angle i dropped a little bit of black ca glue on each little gap where the fret meets the wood and my goal there was basically visual i just wanted to make that gap disappear and then i used that same fret plane to just plane that glue right off and now onto fretwork so step zero basically is to protect the wood because it's already finished so i just went over it uh with masking tape leaving just the frets exposed and then now it's time to level the frets so i went over each fret with a sharpie and then hit it with that same radius tool and the goal here is to to get it to the point where just a tiny bit like a tiny silver stripe is on the top of each fret because that means that it's pretty much level and then using this little fret leveling gauge i went through and individually checked and adjusted every single fret all the way down the fretboard and once the frets were all level they have little flat tops so i went over and sharpied them again and now this time i'm gonna go over each one with this little z-shaped file and round the frets over so before while i was trying to get just a little bit of sharpie to come off the top now i want to get all of the sharpie off except for the little stripe on the top so the sharpie is a really good way to make sure that you don't accidentally nick a fret and make it too low and then you'll have to start the whole process all over again so i went down the fingerboard and did every single fret like this with a 300 grit file and then right before i shaped it i went over the bevels again with the leveling file just to get a really nice 45 degrees down the ends and then i grabbed a fret dressing file which is like a very very tiny file basically and carefully rounded over every single fret end and so you want this to be nice and smooth so as a player slides their hand up and down the neck they're not going to cut themselves or even feel the frets and then when i was done dressing the ends i grabbed little pieces of sandpaper and wrapped them around my z file and basically worked my way up from the 300 grit that the file was all the way to a thousand grit and that brought a lot of shine and polish to those frets the frets by the way are stainless steel so all in my guesstimate is that i probably spent seven or eight hours on just the frets and with the neck pretty much done it was time to move on to finishing both pieces so i gave both of them a final sanding up to about 320 and then to finish the neck i actually just attached a little piece of scrap wood to the neck pocket and set it up in my jaws vise for the suggestion of one of my luthier friends i actually opted for a new finish on this one and i used spray on shellac and i've been sleeping on this you guys like it's such a good finish and what i really liked about it is that it was all natural so it's basically just made out of bug excrement which means that you can spray it outside guilt-free um it's not toxic at all i think it's even food safe not that i'm like licking my base that would be that would be weird uh but it also each layer dissolves into the previous layer so you don't actually need to sand between layers to get a really nice bond i did sand between at least a couple of my coats because i wanted to get a smoother and smoother finish but yeah it was so easy in total for the body i did either i think five coats and i sanded after the first coat and before the last coat and that's it [Music] right before finishing the neck i wiped down the ebony really really well and then gave all of the maple a really good sanding a lot of ebony dust was kind of slowly working its way into the maple and tarnishing the color um so sanding it all out right before i finished it was kind of like the move here so i went in smoothed everything out and then i was ready to shellack the neck as well oh and i've masking taped off the fretboard because only the maple is going to get this hard finish the fretboard will get like a soft beeswaxy oil finish to it and that is just like nice for playability and man look at those tiger stripes ah and now is the scariest part of any kind of electric instrument is when you take your beautiful base and potentially put holes in all the wrong places so this one from the bridge to the cavity was pretty easy but then from the cavity to the two pickups was incredibly frightening to say the least and also this is the part of the build where i realized i'm never gonna build another instrument out of purple heart again it is so hard to get all the teeny little screws into i think if i was gonna do it again i would put like machine screw inserts in and then just use machine screws because it was eating drill bits and it was eating screws and just miserable so as a result i'm actually going to fast forward through most of it because i don't want to talk about it it was such a bad day if you are interested in the hardware that i used though i used golden age pickups a hip shot bridge all of that stuff is linked down in the description below and those are affiliate links by the way huge huge thank you to stumack for providing me with all of the tools and all of the hardware for this project [Music] [Music] take off the tape i'm so tired that it like i there's no joy in this anymore all hoya i'm done i'm going home but alas i could not go home because my base was still nutless so goes the ways of the base now this nut i'm making is made out of actual bone they used to be made out of ivory um however ivory looks a whole lot better is still attached to the elephant so please don't use ivory for things because obviously it's like super damaging to an endangered species anyway um this piece comes a little bit oversized and you just have to like sand it down to shape until it's a really really tight fit in that nut slot and then i used half a pencil to mark where the fret hits like what the height of the fret is and then i sand it to about double that once i was happy with the fit i put two tiny dabs of ca glue in the slot just to hold it in like for sure um and gently hammered my nut in then using a string spacing rule i marked out where each of the string slots need to be and then used a fretting saw to start the cuts and then i worked my way up with nut files but i think i lost that footage because this is all i got sorry and then it was just time to set it up so i strung it up and i did actually take it to a guy named doug graham at bologna creek lutherie who was a super awesome luthier and he helped me like check into nation and pick up heights and stuff and i figured you know at some point a real luthier should look at it [Music] [Music] um [Laughter] [Music] [Music] you really nailed this base it's really interesting so you built this without never having held a base before yeah that's pretty sick i mean this is really good like the neck feels really good it feels like it's in between a p bass and a jazz face that was very intentional [Music] slo-mo [Music] please like and subscribe hashtag content slap that subscribe button gross [Music] [Music] if you watch this video with your family and you're feeling super inspired to try an instrument of your own but this is a little bit intimidating for you let me recommend the sponsor of today's video which is kiwico kiwiko creates hands-on steam education kits for kids of all ages including this really fun ukulele kit those of you who've been watching my channel for a while you've maybe noticed that i've filmed most of my sponsor segments in my shop but i actually decided to come and film this on my coffee table in my living room because everything you need for a kiwiko kit comes in the box so you don't need my fancy shop for that one of the best things i think that keeping code teaches kids is creative confidence it's confidence in your hands and what they can create and that you can make whatever your mind thinks of [Music] anyway click the link in the description below for 50 off your first order or go to cubico.com i can't talk and play at the same time that's proof that i play a single note instrument that doesn't involve singing bye [Music] that's not what the internet wants youtube doesn't like

Channel: Xyla Foxlin

Views: 319,829

Keywords:

Id: KML8mQIZkNI

Length: 36min 48sec (2208 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022

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