Wings

I spent an hour or so cleaning up the neck, its looking pretty good now - I took out the "safety bumps" on both sides. I was thinking I might need to use them to connect the wings to the body, they're not needed so I took them off. I didn't take a new picture of the neck since it really doesn't look a lot different than it did. It was a solid hour of slow sanding, marking, sanding... repeat.

I'm itching to start putting the pieces together, but I need to tackle the back of the neck. I don't want to go out of order, but I'm thinking about making the wings just so I can settle my mind about how they will attach. That's probably not a very good reason to skip around though and more likely a feeble attempt at procrastinating that neck carving.

I have a piece of black walnut that I'm planning on using for the body of the bass - I'll make two "wings" then connect them over the neck - when I'm done you won't be able to see the neck at all from the front of the bass, which is actually a shame because the maple in the neck is pretty nice looking.

I did "mess around" a bit with the walnut tonight. I cut it into two pieces (just to make it easier to handle and work with) and I put both pieces through the planer. I had to take quite a bit off to get it flat - its amazing how a piece of wood looks nice and flat, you put it through the planer and see just how bowed  or warped it is.

I need to figure out how to cut the walnut to show the best figuring. If its possible I want to keep the grain parallel between the two pieces and still have some figuring that you can see. So far here's where I'm at:

Upper wing:

Lower wing: 

I like where the figuring shows up, but not really happy with how the grain will match between the two sides. I really would like to have it look like one piece of wood when its done. I'm not sure that's possible, but that's my aim.

I'm itching to spend some real quality time on the building, but I just don't see that happening in the next week or so, its going to be an hour at a time here and there.