Handmade
Bass Guitar

Between August and October 2025 I designed and built a bass guitar out of planks of ebiara, padouk, and linden wood.

I enjoyed the whole process, from choosing the materials to playing the guitar itself. I learned many new methods, such as how to sand the frets so precisely, how to glue large surfaces precisely, and how to fabricate small parts. I also wrote a physics report for my school about this project; you can find it below.

I really enjoyed this whole project. Let me share the result and the building process below.

The Finished Instrument

Building Process

Why did I build a bass guitar?

I had been thinking about building some kind of musical instrument for a long time. I tried a couple of things; for example, I made a bamboo flute and a guitar you could strum, but it was inaccurate and you couldn’t adjust the string tension. It was more of a game. I had just started learning to play the bass guitar; my dad also plays jazz guitar a lot, so I thought that now I could build a real instrument.

The bass guitar turned out to be an easier project than building an acoustic guitar, since it requires shaping a hollow body, requires much more precise work, and takes a lot longer to build. The bass guitar is a good beginner project for building a professional instrument.

However, it offered many challenges that I had not yet dealt with, for example, how exactly I should make the fretboard. I knew I could work accurately with wood, but I was curious if I could build an accurate professional instrument.

Design development

I wanted my own design, a bit different from the classic bass guitar shape. I really liked the neck-through design; it is a special shape whose essence is that the neck goes through the body, thus splitting it into two parts, the wings. This is an advantageous design, as the guitar will be stronger and can better withstand the tension created by the strings. I chose contrasting wood types for the construction: padouk, ebiara, and linden.

These are hardwoods, resistant to wear and tear from use. I mixed curved and angular shapes, thus making the design more interesting. Where the instrument fits the guitarist’s body, I rounded the guitar more to make it more comfortable, but in the rest of the parts I did minimal grinding so as not to take away from the special angular design.

I replaced the electronic parts with self-made wooden elements, such as the plastic cover of the pickups and the volume and tone knobs. The lower end of the fingerboard flows into the lower wing in a line, in an arc; even though these are separate materials, the design connects them nicely.

Materials

I chose linden wood for the neck of the guitar, a reasonably priced, beautiful, hard, smooth, white wood with some greyish spots, a beautiful combination also found in Europe. For the body and wings, I chose red zebra wood, also known as ebiara, from the rainforests of West and Central Africa. For the fingerboard, I chose padouk wood; its intense red color impressed me, and it comes from the same place as ebiara. These are the essential materials that had to be purchased for the guitar.

I also made a couple of small parts of the instrument from walnut, which was a material that I already had in my workshop. For example, the box for the pickups and the sheet that covers the electronics cavity.

Making the neck shape

First, I cut out the outline of the neck from the top of the basswood. I measured the dimensions (how wide the neck should be at both ends) from an existing bass guitar, a Fender J bass replica. Since the long neck wouldn’t fit under the scroll saw, which is a saw that has a thin blade that moves up and down and requires moving the wood, I had to find another way. I sawed the neck from the side to the desired width, then carved out the remaining wood and sanded the surface with a Japanese rasp. This tool was vital in making the guitar; it has two saw blades next to each other, and you can quickly remove wood with it. I sanded the head of the guitar flat using the same method as the neck, with a slight slope towards the end of the head. This helps the strings to tension properly on the upper bridge. The Japanese rasp leaves a relatively rough surface, so I had to finish the job with sandpaper.

The truss rod

The truss rod runs all the way inside the neck, under the fingerboard, and by stretching it through an opening at the headstock, you can adjust the bend of the entire neck, compensating for the tension of the strings in the other direction. This structure is inserted into a thin slot, which is usually carved out with a router.

I don’t have such a tool, so I had to find another solution. I drew a straight line in the middle of the neck, running from end to end, and drilled about a hundred holes along it with my bench drill. This way, the depth and width of the groove were just right. I used a carving knife to cut off the remaining wood between each circular hole. Finally, I finished the groove with sandpaper. The truss rod was easy to insert; no screws or glue were needed.

Making the fingerboard

The pad was 10 mm thick, but the fingerboard only had to be 6 mm thick. I glued it to the neck so that the truss rod was already inserted.

I sawed off the remaining wood from the side because the base material was wider than the neck itself. I sanded the side evenly with my sander that I built; it is a sanding head mounted on a hand drill, and you can sand it at 90°. I sanded the fingerboard with the Japanese rasp to the curve of the frets, while fitting the already bent ones.

Placing the frets

I distributed the frets based on a formula. I measured the position of each fret on the neck’s fingerboard with a ruler very precisely, because if one of them slips, the guitar will be fake. I held a wooden block on the fingerboard and, next to it, with a piece of Japanese grass, gently holding it at 90°, I sawed the slots into which the frets would be inserted. It was important to choose this saw, since the blade cannot be wider than the soles of the frets.

I marked on the saw with masking tape how deep the wood should be cut. Before I even put the frets in, I drilled the fingerboard at the position markers, then glued 6 mm bamboo cylinder wood, 3 mm into the top and sides of the fingerboard. I sawed off and sanded down the remaining excess.

I hit the frets into the slots with a rubber mallet; they were the same length and already curved. I cut off the overhanging ends with a pair of pliers. I glued metal sandpaper to a piece of wood and sanded the ends of the frets to a fine curve.

Now came the most precise part. I had to sand the tops of them flat, because if one of them was higher or lower, the instrument would not have a clear sound. I did this by coloring the tops of each one with a felt-tip pen, and using the sanding block I had just used, I sanded the tops of each one by dragging the sandpaper parallel to the neck until the true color of each fret was visible from under the felt-tip pen. I rounded the resulting rectangular frets with a special rasp to minimize the surface area where the string touches the fret when pressed.

Rounding the Back of the Neck

I rounded the back of the guitar’s neck using my Japanese rasp on the straight part of the neck, and a curved rasp on the end where it meets the body. First, I sanded it square, in long straight lines, to keep the neck proportional and even. Then I rounded it off nicely, using the rasp to connect the edges. This was the point in the build when it really started to look like the guitar’s neck would be.

The guitar body

I traced the body of our existing bass guitar on a piece of cardboard and transformed its shape into a design I liked. This gave me two wings, which we call that because they connect to the part of the neck that is already in the body from the side. These two shapes only fit on the ebiara wood by being screwed in next to each other, not one after the other. This is why the guitar got the characteristic direction of the wings’ veins. I cut them out with a scroll saw and sanded them smooth with my homemade sander and another one for internal curves.

The pickups

The pickup housings were made of plastic, and I definitely wanted to replace them because they wouldn’t have fit into the design. Finally, I made them out of walnut by milling out the inside of a walnut block, then making the top and drilling the holes for the little protruding magnets. I carved out the pickups from the neck and the wings of the guitar, since the pickups were longer than the width of the neck. I sawed the neck down to the depth the pickups needed to go into, removed the wood that was left in between, and sanded it down. I drilled into the wings with a bench drill, then used a carving knife to cut away the material between the circles. Unfortunately, the drill can’t drill deeper than 1 inch, so I carved out the remaining depth.

The electronics

I wanted the guitar to not have the classic look, i.e. a cover on top of the body, but to be at the back, and only the coils would be visible from the front. I carved a small hole in the back of the lower wing, which is necessary for the electronics. I did this in the same way as I carved the pickups out of the wings. I drilled the outline of the hole, carved it out, and then put the wing under the drill; only then did I tighten the drill bit so that I could drill down to the end of the thickness of the wing, leaving only 2–3 mm of material, in which I drilled four holes for the three coils and the base. I covered the back with walnut wood, filled in the space with a chisel, and secured it with two screws. I drilled two holes between the electronics cavity and the two pickup cavities; this is where the cables will go. I made the coils of two pickups from walnut, and the tone knob from padouk. I inserted a cylinder of wood into the middle of the wooden pieces, clamped it in my screwdriver, and held it against the bench grinder so that they were symmetrically centered.

Finalizing the body

I hadn’t sanded it yet, to make it more stable and easier to work with for the electronics. Now I could sand it. First, I cut a piece from the front of the upper wing, drilled a straight line to the same depth, and sawed the wood to almost this depth. I cut off the excess material and sanded it with the Japanese rasp until all the holes were gone. I also cut the ends of the horns of both wings to 14. I rounded the middle of the back where the body leans when you play with it.

I sanded all the other edges lightly, just to make it feel good. I did the sanding in the middle of both wings because the clay of the wing was thicker than that of the neck.

I glued the two wings to the neck with wood glue, making sure that the pickup locations on the three elements were in line. I held them together with huge quick-clamps and inserted pieces of wood between them and the guitar so that it wouldn’t press on the wings.

Finalization

I drilled the tuning key holes on the headstock of the guitar, making sure that they remained in line with the neck. It is important to hold the wood against something, because if I just drill it out, the wood will crack.

I attached the pickups from the back with a screw, and I pushed a small nail between them and the neck so that I could drill them through at exactly the same point. I had to drill into the pickups precisely, since their walls are only 5 mm thick. We soldered the electronics in, and it was ready in 15 minutes. Then I realized that the electronics needed to be grounded; a cable needed to touch the bridge so that the instrument wouldn’t buzz. I used a 30 cm long drill bit to drill a hole between the bridge and the rear pickup, and I ran the cable through it. I had to scrape the paint off the back of the bridge, as it acted as an insulating layer.

I screwed on and placed the top bridge and the nut. I installed the tuning keys, strung it up, and tested its operation. We adjusted the height of the bridge a bit; the top one had to be sanded down because it was too high. The guitar was also a bit resonant, so the strings had to be held down on the headstock. I made a small string guide gate out of padouk wood with a sponge and attached it with two screws. I covered the hole at the end of the truss rod with a walnut sheet and burned the Antutna logo into it with a soldering iron. Before that, I carved a small depression with a carving knife and burned along it. I just came up with this logo; before that, I hammered “Antutna” into the wood with metal letters. This is my brand.

I unstrung the guitar, removed the bridge, tuning pegs, electronics coils, and waxed the entire guitar. While that was drying, I made the lugs from padouk wood to hang the strap on. I put a dowel rod in the middle of the wood, then clamped it in my screwdriver and pressed it against the sander, giving it its characteristic tapered shape. I also waxed this, then secured it with a screw and placed a thin rubber ring between it and the body, ensuring that it would be clamped in place. I assembled everything, and now the bass guitar worked perfectly.

Physics school paper

At ELTE Radnóti Miklós High School in Budapest, in year 11, each student chooses a personal project to write about. I chose this bass guitar, and wrote about the design and building process, as well as some of the physics of how an electric bass guitar works. See the PDF below (in Hungarian)

somlai fischer anton basszus gitar epitese.pdf

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Handmade Bass Guitar