Nova Guitar - Progress

So, if you've been following along (of course you have), you'll know that the winner of Radio Nova's Rocktober Win-A-Haze-Custom-Guitar competition is keen to get hold of a Bassmaster—the six-string, short-scale bass. Groovy, indeed.

So, I figure we're overdue a bit of an update on the progress of this build as it makes the transition from hunk of wood, to a fantastic, rocktastic, basstastic, instrument.

As this bass is going to be finished in a snazzy, 'black-burst', I've selected a nice, one-piece ash body. That grain will peek through the finish and look very tasty indeed.

So let's get it moving. The first image above shows the rough-cut body. I marked the shape on the ash blank using the well-worn template you can just see behind (making templates is pretty dull but it's time well spent) and band-sawed close to the outline. This leaves me with a vaguely guitar-shaped bit of timber with reasonably rough edges.

Those rough edges are soon taken care of with a router, however. Then the control and tremolo tailpiece cavity are routed (the image on the left). It's starting to look a bit more like a guitar, isn't it?

To my mind, though, it's the rounding over of those sharp corners that really starts to make this look like an actual guitar. I always feel this step (photo on right) is when the wood stops being a bit of a tree and starts being a guitar or bass.

There's still some routing to be done on this. The neck pocket, obviously and the cavity for the rhythm circuit. More on these soon but, for now, I think we'll do some work on the neck.

If you want to keep track of this particular instrument, you can use http://hazeguitars.com/blog/?tag=novabass

Stay tuned…