Markku Nyytäjä's Generatrix Kitchen Bass (Pictures)

[Markku Nyytäjä]

Last Tuesday, 15 minutes to midnight, I locked the workshop door with a newly finished bass guitar on my back. This is the second one of the same Generatrix model but the first one equipped with pickups of my own "design" and make. They are dual coil humbucking bass pickups and basically just two Jazz Bass single coils wired in series. The neck pickup DC resistance is 12.45kΩ and that of the bridge pickup is 11.52 kΩ, so there is some thunder expected.

The bass was dubbed "Kitchen Bass", because I used kitchen wood in its construction. The body is made of a beechwood kitchen workbench slab and the top is made of a rubberwood cutting board. I routed a chamber in the body to reduce weight, but the instrument is still heavier than its older sister made of alder and flamed birch. I finished the bass first with Danish oil but decided then to give the wood a more protective finish and sprayed it a couple of times with 2-component acrylic lacquer. I brushed the surface to satin finish with 0000 grade steelwool for a natural feel and topped it with carnauba wax.
These are the specifications:

Body beech, top rubber tree, back gaboon veneer, satin finish with carnauba wax
Bolt-on neck maple 34"/864 mm scale, rosewood fingerboard, bone nut, headstock top gaboon veneer, satin finish with carnauba wax
Neck pickup NYDE Bassbucker 12.45kΩ, bridge pickup NYDE Bassbucker 11.52 kΩ, beech covers
2 volumes, 1 master tone, Life Saver filter at the grounds, electronics cavity cover birch plywood & gaboon veneer
Hipshot style Bass Bridge, sealed tuners 18: ratio, chrome hardware

There are MP3 sound clips behind the following links:

http://maihinnousu.net/s/15639
http://maihinnousu.net/s/15638
http://maihinnousu.net/s/15641

[Markku Nyytäjä]

Here come the studio portraits.

[Markku Nyytäjä]

[Markku Nyytäjä]

[Markku Nyytäjä]

Here they are. Next time online I'll post workshop pictures along with a construction report.

[Markku Nyytäjä]

OK. Here come some workshop pictures. As usual, it all started with the neck. I had already purchased a 34" scale rosewood fretboard, the neck itself would be maple, have a glued-on headstock in a 15-degree angle and a dual-action truss rod.

[Markku Nyytäjä]

The beech slab I had yielded two instrument bodies. This was one of them. I used a rubberwood cutting board for top. Both of these woods are rather heavy, so I routed an additional chamber in the body before glueing the top on. The back is 2.8 mm thick gaboon veneer. I cut the body out with a bandsaw, routed the sides flush and sanded it with several different sanders.

[Markku Nyytäjä]

I have already posted anoter thread on my self-made dual-coil pickups and the pickup covers, so I'm not posting them here. I measured the covers to determine the size of the pickup cavities, made routing templates and the routed the cavities. The neck pickup would be placed 710 mm from the nut and the bridge pickup 810 mm from the nut. Before routing I drilled away quite a bit of wood with forstner bits.

[Markku Nyytäjä]

After finishing the neck and body I put the bass temporarily together and strung it with a 45-100 set of strings to find if there were any major flaws to correct. There was only one minor one. I had to exhaust all the adjustment space of the bridge saddles to get the intonation right, so I drilled new holes and moved the bridge back 10 millimetres.

I wanted recessed control knobs. I first drilled around the pot shaft holes with a 20 mm forstner bit and then sanded the edges.

[Markku Nyytäjä]

Preliminarily I had planned to finish the bass with Danish oil only. I applied several coats and let the oil cure between layers. The surface turned out quite pleasant but not quite what I was looking for. Even small scratches and dents were clearly visible and I also wanted the finish to have some resistance to wear, so I ended up spraying a couple of layers of clear lacquer, wet-sanding sanding the surface with 800 & 1200 grit papers between coats.

[Markku Nyytäjä]

[Markku Nyytäjä]

When the surface was nice and even I brushed it to satin shimmer with 0000 grade steelwool and topped it with carnauba wax. Now I had the finish I wanted.

[Markku Nyytäjä]

What I had left was installing the electronics and assembling the instrument. I had the electronics as a module assembled on a copper sheet and all I had to do was connect the pickups and ground the electronics. In every instrument I build I wire the bridge grounds through a Life Saver filter consisting of a 220 kΩ resistor and a 1 nF 600V capacitor wired in parallel. In case a sudden hight tension peak from a malfunctioning amp should occur, it will reduce the voltage to a safe level.

Okay, the pickups & electronics are installed. Now the bridge...

... and the neck. I was worried I wouldn't be able to finish this bass, as I couldn't find the neck attachment ferrules I had put in a safe place. As a result I looked for them for a good 40 minutes before finding them in my file & rasp drawer- where I don't remember putting them. I'll have to keep the workshop in a better order in the future.

[Markku Nyytäjä]

I strung the bass with a standard set of D'Addario XL 45-100 gauge bright bass strings.

Tuning didn't take long using an electronic tuner.

Setting the intonation also turned out to be an easy task. Moving the bridge back had been a smart thing to do, as I only had to adjust the G and D string saddles a little to get the intonation to a perfect pitch.

[Markku Nyytäjä]

And finally ... It's alive!

[Steve Senseney]

Nice work. Clean looking instrument.

[Markku Nyytäjä]

Thanks, Steve. I like it myself too.

[Jason Rodgers]

Love your construction process pics, Markku! Cool bass, too!

[Tim Douglass]

Nice looking bass. Thanks for the construction pics, those are always interesting to me.