This project was begun on January 9, 2006. It's a fretless neck-through bass for Alan in New Jersey. The general specifications are: Neck-through construction The neck core is quarter-sawn maple with a 1/4" walnut stripe down the centerline. The fingerboard will be Wenge with inlaid maple fretlines and white MOP dot inlays The scale length will be 33" and the nut width will be 1-7/16" The body sides will be African Mahogany, separated from the body by 1/8" thick curly koa The pickups will consist of one Precision-style Bartolini pickup model 8CBP, and one Bartolini Jazz-style pickup, model 9CBJD-1-T The bass will be equipped with a 3-band Bartolini preamp/EQ with parametric midrange and an active/passive switch The bass will be equipped with black hardware. January 9, 2006: This first picture is of the neck core a couple of hours after I glued it up, still in the clamps:

Another picture of one end of the neck core, showing the 1/4" walnut centerline stripe: After I clean up the glue squeeze-out and true up the surfaces of the neck core, the next step will be to lay out the geometry of the bass on the neck core in pencil. That will tell me where to make the cuts necessary: To make a channel for the truss rod To cut the headstock and neck profiles To shape the neck core to receive the body sides

January 11 2006: The electronics arrived today. What we have here is: One Bartolini 8CBP pickup One Bartolini 9CBJD-L pickup One Bartolini 5.2AP Preamp (3-band EQ, with active/passive switch on the volume control, midrange frequency selection switch on the midrange control) The preamp comes pre-wired with a battery plug, but that will be replaced by a battery box that will be mounted adjacent to the control cavity on the back side of the bass.

The neck block is being prepped for cutting in this next set of pictures. First, the layout of the headstock:

Next, the layout of the cutaway area of the body:

Another shot of the neck block (the body template that will be used to make the body wings--Carvin calls 'em Body Sides"-- is shown in this picture):

In this shot, the fingerboard blank is resting on the neck block. It has been thickness-sanded to 9/32" thick:

January 14, 2006: Spent mosty of today working on the fingerboard and neck core. The fingerboard has been slotted, inlaid, and installed on the neck core, and the result is shown in the next few pictures:

March 7, 2006: This next set of pictures shows the neck core after carving to profile:

This one shows the position makers on the edge of the fingerboard:

The next three pictures show the body during glue-up. The body wings were cut to shape from a piece of 1-3/4" thick Honduran Mahogany. I saved the fall-off pieces to use as clamping cauls during the glue-up, as shown below: