I Built a Reggae Bass Out of Colored Pencils

[Music] all right so this video is gonna be a little bit different than my others firstly I want to thank skill Shea for sponsoring this video and I want to go a bit more in depth on the processes of building a guitar in this video and although I'm going to be explaining my steps for the most part don't take this as an instructional video or a guide on how to build a guitar there's much better resources even videos here on YouTube that will do a much better job explaining that I just kind of want to let you guys in on what I'm thinking when I do build a guitar so it's been a while since my last colored pencil guitar project and I thought since I've got a bunch of colored pencils leftover in that rig a coloration of red green yellow and black I thought I'd try taking a stab a bass guitar so this is the colored pencil reggae bass to be honest I don't really know where I'm going with this I usually just get the idea for a project in my head then just start at it and see where it goes from there but anyways I'm trying to make the pencils kind of flower out so that they're more vertical in the center and as they go to the edges their angles get more dramatic also you'll notice the pencils in the middle are significantly shorter and that's because I have this piece of cherry that I'm going to try to implant in the guitar so this will end up being the back side of the guitar [Music] all right so I know you guys probably noticed some major changes to my setup most notably switched out my bandsaw blade from a 3/8 inch to a quarter inch blade thanks for noticing oh I also got a new rubber mallet that thing's pretty cool so yeah obviously I'm in the new workspace or garage I've spent the last week kind of building out these work tables got this one here that's on casters so I can move it around and this one on the wall and I've also set up a pegboard behind it so it's coming along it will probably take me a while to get totally settled in here for now I'm kind of confined to this corner of the garage but I'm sure I'll inevitably creep further back in there yeah but I'm really looking forward to working out of here now and seeing what potential projects this new space will bring if I pour all the necessary resin at once it's gonna exotherm and heat up like crazy the epoxy is likely to crack in those conditions so what I'm going to do is step pour this in layers and it'll probably take about four or five boards to fill this up completely instead of placing this piece of wooden here right now what I'm actually gonna do is place this piece of foam that I covered in taping here now I'm doing this because I think I'm gonna have to lower the section where the wood will eventually get placed if I put it in right now it won't be at the correct depth for the cross section that I want from the pencils all right well as you can see the epoxy on that last pour ended up getting pretty hot and will pretty much melt at the foam so that idea didn't work out too well it's also got a few cracks in the epoxy but it's alright because I plan on taking off the top inch or so of this slab so the first step here is to grind all of the protruding pencils off the top so that I can take this over to my router sled jig I've shared my router sled jigs in my other videos but the way it works is the router sits in this track and moves back and forth to give in level cut to whatever's beneath it I usually will use a pretty large mortising bit for this like a one or one and a half inch bit and this is obviously my favorite part of any guitar build [Music] [Music] alright well that's about three hours or so of routing and I finally got a pretty decent slab it's a bit thinner than I wanted but I had to keep grinding off layers until I got to the cross section that I want which is about right here I've also decided to just go without the piece of wood and set it into the body and I'm just going to leave the resin instead so next up is to draw out the shape of the guitar and then get it cut out on the bandsaw got the body roughly cut out and now I'm gonna use this oscillating belt sander to shape the body to get it where I want it this sander is probably one of the pieces of equipment that I use most during any guitar build so I cut out a neck pocket template out of a scrap piece of MDF now I'm just gonna take the router with a short template bit on it and slowly take out material to form the neck pocket I'm also gonna do the pickup cavities right now [Music] so this is a half inch roundover bit and the trick to this is to make sure you're always aware of the direction the bit is spinning it's super important to move the workpiece against the direction of the rotation if you were to move it in the same direction as the the bit can grab the workpiece and send it flying like a pitching machine alright gonna get started on making the neck now this is a pretty nice piece of cherry that I actually found at Home Depot and it's got some pretty cool random figure throughout it but I think it'll make a pretty good looking neck I've got this double action truss rod to accompany it I know in my last video I got a lot of comments asking why I didn't put a truss rod in the neck and I did I just didn't film any video of me placing it in so I've got a little straight bit in the router table and I've got this piece of wood clamped to the table on the side on the end of my neck link I've marked the depth that I need for the truss rod of all who is ride the neck link along this piece of wood which will give me a nice straight channel to place the dresser here's a nice evany finger board that I'm gonna glue on to the neck now I'll get the truss rod installed and then I'll get to gluing the fingerboard on so I've got another little router jig this one is used to thin out the headstock of it basically the router just sits on it and the entire jig slides around at a fixed cutting height [Music] [Music] [Music] on this guitar I want to try using color pencils as the fret markers and I don't see any reason why this wouldn't work out so I'm gonna give it a shot [Music] so pencil guitars can be really heavy which is why on this one I'm gonna try routing out two big cavities in the back I cut out these two templates from MDF and I'll use them as guides for the template bits a buddy of mine let me bring it over this old Delta drill press and this things are really old but it should still get the job done so I've got a one inch Forstner bit in there right now and I'm just gonna hog out the bulk of the material from these cavities before I route them routers are good to use for cleanup work but the drill press is really a much better option for removing bulk material I think the marble effect in the resin is really cool but I'm not all that stoked on these random pencils that are here in the middle section I wish there was some more uniformity so I think what I'm gonna try doing is painting a couple of red green and yellow stripes to cover up those pencils I'm gonna try a different technique for finishing on this guitar this perimeter is made of corrugated plastic and it surrounds the guitar body leaving roughly a half inch around the entire perimeter so what I'm gonna do is take some thick set epoxy and do a flood coat so that the body will essentially be casted in resin it's why I've also got these cavities filled up with clay so that they don't get filling by the resin and then I've got these sticks here so that I can place a weight on top of it so that the body doesn't float in the resin I'm not totally sure how this is gonna work but I figured it'd be worth the shot and if it does work out it'll leave a nice thick finish all right the top is cured and I just flipped it over and cut out the pink foam and now I've got a nice little lip covering the entire bottom so I'm gonna go ahead and do the same exact thing to this side as it did to the top I thought I'd be able to just rip off the plastic from the sides but their resin kind of cured to the foam so it's making it difficult just to rip off so I'm just gonna go ahead and do it the less gentle way and grind through it all now I've got the edges rounded over and I've got to reroute the cavities again all I'm using is a bottom bearing template bit and it's only cutting an eighth of an inch or so of resin so it's this should be pretty quick Bend a bit more sanding some polishing and I'll get everything installed [Music] [Music] so I actually am pretty satisfied with how it turned out I like the overall look of it it's the lightest epoxy guitar I've built yet and well I don't know a whole lot about bass guitars but it sounds fine to me now I never expect these things that cannot perfect they're as much of an experiment as much as they are guitars but with that said this one's not perfect as well so the back of the guitar well I wish I just would have left the resin that was initially there and not painted the stripes that kind of feel out of place to me and when I did the flood coat of resin some resin leaked through to the back and left some resin marks on the stripes I don't know maybe some of you will like the stripes but I could have done without them I do think the cavities look cool and they definitely help out with reducing the weight a lot the flood coating with epoxy idea worked out pretty well there are some bubbles that are trapped in there so it's not flawless but like I've said in previous videos I think I'll need to build a pressure chamber someday if I want to get the best results from these methods but it definitely adds a good amount of strength to the entire guitar without that casting coat of resin I'm not sure how well this guitar would have held together considering that the neck pocket was just over like a half inch thick but now as you can see there's like an epoxy harness around the entire neck pocket as well as it's considerably thicker plus the finish just looks really cool at the right angles because it's so thick all right let's get an official weight on this thing it looks like just over nine pounds so pretty good I had originally wanted to insert a piece of cherry into the body but after the series of events that described earlier in the video I just decided to leave the resin in there so this middle stretch right here is basically just thick resin not many pencils in there and so that should be fairly strong the pencil orientation didn't come out in a perfect pattern but it's all good I wasn't trying to be very exact with the pencil arrangement on this guitar and I kind of liked that messy look of the pattern I keep having the a-string slip out of the nut slot it was actually out of the nut slot for the entire demo I think so I've got to follow that down a bit more so it sticks in there but other than that everything seems to play real well with this guitar the tune dried up really no intonation was needed the cherry wood from Home Depot worked out really well from the neck I think the neck looks great overall I also really like the color pencil inlays for the fret markers I did level and reek round the frets I just didn't end up showing that in the video but overall the neck feels really good at least to me being a guitar player which brings me to my final point I don't really know how to play bass I've spent the past day kind of messing around on it but it's really kind of the first time I've picked up a bass guitar I just got done filming the demo and so just know that I'm not gonna do this thing much justice by my playing but I did give it my best shot as always if you guys would like to follow my work in-between build videos here on YouTube you can follow me on my Instagram at Brossart [Music] [Music] [Music] I'd like to take this time to thank my sponsor for the video skill share skill shares in the online learning community with thousands of classes covering dozens of creative and entrepreneurial skills explore classes and everything from crafts and Fine Arts to marketing photography and more Premium Membership gives you unlimited access to high-quality classes from experts working in their fields to help you gain new skills and live your best life skills share is also incredibly affordable and an annual subscription is less than ten dollars a month I always get asked what's the simplest way to learn guitar and I've never really had a good answer for that but once I checked out Mike Boyd's class on guitar fundamentals where he breaks down the basics to learning guitar in a way that's fun and easy to follow I knew that I can feel confident in recommending this class too because I'm not good at teaching people how to play guitar but Mike Boyd is so if that's something you're interested in I highly suggest checking out that class anyways that's just one of the mini classes you can find on Skillshare you can click on the link in the description below to get a 2 month free trial of Skillshare premium skill share can be a big help with whatever you're trying to learn and it's cool because they're also helping out here with what I'm doing as well so thanks again skills sheriff response to this video [Music]

Channel: Burls Art

Views: 5,171,775

Keywords: colored pencil art, epoxy art, epoxy project, epoxy guitar, colored pencil guitar, how to build a guitar, homemade guitar, bobby duke arts, bobby duke, colored pencils, bass guitar, jazz bass build, homemade bass guitar, epoxy bass guitar, how to build a bass guitar, how to play guitar, how to play bass, fender jazz bass, stratocaster, telecaster

Id: 7_9l9WKQYf0

Length: 18min 20sec (1100 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/clearly_quite_absurd]

I love Burl's Art so much.