Inlays!

It was a tough, but productive day at the shop today. After a few false starts with router and clamping issues we got the pockets for the inlays routed out. If I haven't mentioned it before, my father has been helping me out with the tough steps. I'm a router novice so he ran the show today - or at least the parts involving the router.

I'll admit to being a intimidated at times working in my dad's shop, but I've done almost everything on my own this time around, but I do consult him when I'm not sure what to do. He's saved me from my ignorance many times on the four instruments I've built. Having access to all those high end tools is pretty amazing. Being able to share the time with my father is priceless.

So today we made some templates for the inlays then we clamped them onto the wings and routed out the area. We had to take two passes and we had to move the template for each pass, so it was a pretty time intensive process. I suggested a few shortcuts which my dad labeled as "risky" (we didn't do them).

On to the pictures:

If I had any guts at all, I would have cut the wings to size before this step, I don't so I cut it really big. I'll cut it perfect after I get the spalted maple glued on. I figure if I messed up some measurement somewhere along the way I can still recover. It happened today - that upper horn is right at the edge of "wide" cut, if I cut it where it was marked I would be changing the design.

You'll have to settle for blue chalk lines for now.

I spent over an hour getting the overlay for the headstock perfectly jointed last night, then when I looked at all the pieces this morning, I didn't like the orientation of the grain, so I cut a new one today. The weird thing is it took me 20 minutes tops to cut the new one and get it shaped, I thought I was getting good at it:

I said I thought I was getting good at it, that was before I started working on matching the inlays to the routed out bit. That took a long time. I probably have an hour into each inlay - they are not perfect yet, but actually pretty close. I can probably make them perfect in another hour total. 

A couple of full body shots: 

Right now the inlays are perfectly flush with the walnut, but I'll be putting some anigre underneath it (its an extremely thin, black dyed wood), which will bring it up a bit. After I get it all glued together I'll use a belt sander to bring it back down flush. Someone remind me to route a wiring channel in the lower wing, I am convinced I'm going to forget. That would make wiring the front pickup extremely difficult. 

Good progress, but almost five hours in the shop today. I'm probably still a few steps from getting to a bass shaped object, but I can see it happening soon!