Audiovox Uke Bass (1/2) ~ Luthiery Laboratories

Audiovox Uke Bass (1/2)

This bass is a 21" scale, with a piezo saddle mounted in an adjustable bridge. The soundhole is just for looks. The strings are metal-wound Kalas. The fretboard is cut out of the ugliest piece of wood I ever received. For such a small neck, I managed to cut around most of the ugly, and the result isn't half bad.

These two bodies are maple plywood over a hollow pine core, double-bound. They came out very lightweight, too light to balance even a guitar neck. The short uke bass was always planned. I shuffled parts and bodies between some other projects, and that left the second body free. I thought about it for a while and decided it would make a good mandolin.

Both of these short necks have fixed steel truss rods, although they probably don't need them. Both are finished in polyurethane, with masonite pickguards.

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All Built, Audiovox, Basses, Body - Built, Body - Hollow, Body - Plywood/Wood, Electronics - Active, Electronics - Piezo, Neck - Built, Projects, Uke-Scale Bass,

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Piezos & Buffers

These are all of my piezo creations, so far. All of them utilize a version of the original single-transistor CafeWalter piezo buffer. He encouraged me to use his newer two-transistor version, but I never did get it to work. The simpler circuit works just fine, and I am a great fan of simple things that work.

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Uke-Scale Basses

Basses built with a uke scale length of 21 inches.

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Neck Binding

I decided that two of my Audiovoxen should have bound necks to go with the bound bodies, because binding is really super classy. So here I'm routing the edges for that. I've taped two strips of scrap binding to the top of the fretboard to act as guides, since it is already radiused and otherwise the router would rock on the curve. The neck is stuck onto a piece of 2x4 for clearance, and the whole arrangement is inside a big box to catch most of the mess. You want to go in one long smooth run rather than nibble at it; you're not taking such a big bite that you can't do it in one pass. Those same pieces of binding are going to get glued on later. Notice that the neck still has a square back. This is actually a pretty easy job and would be even easier if it was done prior to radiusing the fretboard. Set the height of the cut to just remove all the rosewood, so the binding butts against the maple. The depth of the cut is not fussy, as there is still a lot of contouring to do.

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