This is a bass being built for Jim in Florida. The bass has these specifications:

• Swamp ash body to be finished in Nitrocellulose lacquer with a pink tint
• Three-piece quartersawn hard maple neck with
  • double action truss rod
  • graphite fiber stabilizing bars
  • Indian rosewood fingerboard
  • medium jumbo frets
  • Headstock tinted to match the body
• Chrome hardware
• ABM bridge
• Hand-wound hum cancelling pickups by Kent Armstrong
• 3-band EQ preamp by Audere Engineering

First, pictures of the body after it has been cut to shape:

The neck is ready for carving:

In this next set of pictures, several things have been done:

• The neck has been carved
• The position markers have been installed
• The frets have been installed
• The pickup cavities, control cavity, battery cavity, and neck pocket have been cut
• The body has been sanded to 220 grit

So in these pictures the neck has been placed in the neck pocket to check for proper fit:

Note the contoured heel area of the body, designed to make access to the high frets easier:

September 24, 2008: The bass is essentially complete, but I'm fixing a finish problem on the headstock. Here are some pictures:

Here's the finish problem I mentioned. It showed up about 4 days after I level-sanded and polished the headstock. Note the white specs between the two decals and on the left side of the CYR decal. At first I thought I had sanded through the clear coat and pink paint into the white primer underneath, but if that had been the case, the logo should have been sanded through as well. My current theory is that tiny air bubbles were trapped in the lacquer, and that these bubbles captured some of the polishing compound I used to polish the surface.

The solution is to sand the headstock again with 600-grit, then recoat with three more coats of clear lacquer.