Playing the CYBER BASS

[unreleased/Cyber Bass funkalizer]

I don't know if the story is true but i heard that a funk band tower of power said that

we are playing the same note as everyone else but we're playing them shorter so that was the reason the gave for their success

and there's something to that with music another cliche is to say that the pauses in the music is more important

than the notes themself and probably no smoke without a fire for for that cliche.

I need to make some space here for the funkalizer to fit in the sign and this beautiful bridge made by Tim keller

from ADHD engineering is something special i promised him to not take the angle grinder to this thing

he actually literally ask me please don't angle grind my beautiful part so i kept my promise i took the chop saw instead.

I haven't told Tim about this yet so he will discover right now, hello Tim i'm very very sorry but i actually

was very serious i made a practice cut and i squared the cut up on the CNC machines i think the final finish is actually

not super far away from what you sent me there you go.

For this build i want to make an extra effort on my finished and the look of the part i didn't want to miss up teams beautiful bridge

and i really didn't want to mess up Carlos montoros work from under the guitars.com plus been building this

costume cyber bass so i wanted to design something in the design traditional of the cyber bass and i wanted this mild steel

parts that i'm welding together here to have a little bit of a more mature finish i'm still kind of new to working with metals

and i never really learned how to make finishes but on this project this part was so small so i wanted to give it

a little bet extra so you can see i cut out these templates here and i spray glue them on no it's easy to drill the hole where it should be.

I can cut the out side the line and then send them to the line.

On electric guitars and basses there is a grounding wire going from the electronics up to the bottom of the bridge

and i needed to drill a hole for that grounding wire but my drills were to short for this deep angle so i made a long drill

from like a stainless 3mm rod i just sharpened it and it went through the wood.

Now i can start think about the finish of this piece and i'm cleaning it with acetone and then i'm using this parma blue blackening

i think i saw something of that from jimmy de resta the first time i saw it it's really cool it has a kind of chemical reaction with the metal

and it protects it a little bit from rust and it makes it kind of black i really love this look but when i tried it on the bass

i thought that the black was really not the same black as the black of the plastic buttons and the plastic marks

i took away the black from the surface but i lefted it on the edges and that look i think was really good

i tried to seal the surface with some lacquer.

Now i can screw on the felt that was actually mario's who taught me that you can actually screw with wood screws

straight into this felt and i'm using these washers to create a kind of an arc because the strings on the bass is not like on one plane

they're like situated in an arc and the strings goes between the screws.

to finish the design off i wanted to have some cool looking knobs, i designed a couple of knobs in fusion and i cut it from aluminum on the CNC

i think the CNC machine is actually doing pretty well with metals maybe not if you measured the tolerances but

for things like this it's perfect and i'm using a hex polt because i don't have a lathe otherwise i would love to make some kind of

manual machined threaded screw for this application but this is a good work around with all the tools and all the materials

that i have at home listen to this wretched sound.

I wasn't really happy actually out of this look and i wanted to make the same contrast as the theme on the cyber bass

like black with metal so i spray painted the bolt and it just looked messy i was afraid that the blackening wouldn't be black enough

and it wouldn't look like the plastic parts on the cyber bass but in the end the spray paint looked awful so i went back

to the blackening and as you can see i'm very happy about this finish.

[unreleased/Cyber Bass funklizer]