Mark Maneja
11 min read
Bill Arico does not play bass, but he built his gigging daughter one that finally stopped diving, on an ash kit with a hand-rubbed oil finish. Here are the ultralight tuners that fixed the balance, the three parts that did not drop straight in, and what you can copy.
Bill Arico builds guitars in Findlay, Ohio, for people who play them. He does not play himself. This one was for his daughter, a working bass player in two bands, and it had to solve a problem her current instrument could not: it had to stop diving. He started with our WB Bass Guitar Kit with Flamed Maple Top, Maple Fretboard, a 279.99 USD kit with an ash body, a flamed maple veneer top and a maple neck, and the reason that kit suited the job is the reason most people overlook. Ash and maple are light to begin with, and on a bass the starting weight is most of the battle.
His daughter is 35, has played bass and guitar since she was a teenager, and gigs in two bands on the eastern side of Florida. The bass she was using on stage was borrowed from another band member. It was a full-size instrument and it was heavy, and she is small. By the back end of a set the headstock was pulling toward the floor and she was fighting it.
I'm not a musician but I build instruments for several players including my daughter. This bass is for her.
So the brief was narrow and testable. In his words, the goal was to create something she could use on stage regularly without concern for electrical issues, neck dive or component failure.
Neck dive is a balance problem, not a weight problem. A bass hangs from two strap buttons, and the upper button sits somewhere near the twelfth fret. Everything on the far side of that button, mostly the neck and the four tuning machines clustered at the very end of it, acts on a long lever arm. Mass out at the headstock counts for far more than the same mass sitting in the body, because it is multiplied by the distance it sits from the pivot. That is why a heavier body is a crude fix and lighter tuners are a precise one: removing 150 grams from the headstock moves the balance point further than removing 150 grams from anywhere else on the instrument. It is also why the problem shows up at the end of a set rather than the start. The imbalance is constant; the arm holding it up is the thing that gets tired.
Bill went at the lever arm directly. Ultralight tuning machines were the single biggest change he made to the kit.
In order to alleviate the neck dive problem, I chose ultralight tuning machines.
Four decisions, and each one has a reason worth stealing.
Mostly, and this is the useful part of the story. Bill replaced the electronics and hardware with US-made parts chosen for service life, because the instrument was going to be gigged rather than admired. His own reason for doing it is the honest one:
Part of the fun for me is shopping for all the best components and creating something that can be played for a lifetime.
He fitted ultralight tuning machines, a high-mass bridge, a matched pair of hum-cancelling pickups for the split and single-coil positions, CTS potentiometers with an Orange Drop capacitor, and a neck plate and rear control cover he had engraved himself. Three things did not simply drop in, and all three are predictable if you know to look.
One: the shielding he added made the pickups too tight.
My biggest problem was my own fault. I shielded all the control cavities and pickup cavities with copper shielding. That little bit of shielding made the pickups super tight in the space but a little grinding/sanding took care of it.
Copper tape is perhaps 0.05 mm thick, which sounds like nothing until you line four walls of a cavity with it and overlap the seams. The route loses roughly a tenth of a millimeter per side, and pickup routes are cut close. If you are going to shield the cavities, do it before you decide the pickups fit.
Two: the headstock holes were the wrong diameter, which he expected.
Also, the headstock was drilled for 1/2" holes but the Hipshot tuners needed 11/16". I knew this going in so it wasn't unexpected to have to drill the headstock for the bigger shafts.
Standard bass tuner posts come in two common shaft sizes, and the kit is drilled for the smaller one. Going up is straightforward because you are enlarging an existing hole. Going the other way is not, so check the shaft diameter before you buy, not after.
Three: the bridge wanted more screws than the body had.
The Leo Quan bridge required a 5-hole mount but the kit is set up for 3-hole.
The three existing holes lined up with the new bridge, so he drilled two more and covered the two forward holes he was no longer using. Then he found the detail that makes this worth repeating:
I found out later Leo Quan makes a 3-hole version of the same bridge so chances are, if I was paying attention, I might not have had to drill any holes at all.
Most bridge manufacturers offer the same bridge in more than one mounting pattern. Ten minutes on the part number would have saved two irreversible holes in a finished body.
Slowly, and with no stain at all.
The finish on the bass is a natural oil blend, hand-rubbed for weeks. The quality of the veneer on the body's face is fantastic. I chose not to stain the wood to keep the natural look and color.
Leaving a flamed veneer unstained is a confident choice, and on this wood it is the right one. Flame is not a color, it is a curl in the fiber that reflects light differently depending on the angle you view it from. Stain can deepen that effect, but it can also flatten it, and a thin veneer gives you very little room to sand back a color you do not like. Oil adds almost no film. It wets the fiber, raises the chatoyance and leaves the figure to do the work, and because it builds in thin coats rather than thick ones it is one of the safest finishes to put over veneer. The cost is time.
It does take a substantial amount of time to do oil finishes but it's generally worth it.
If you are weighing this route for your own build, our guides on choosing a finish and guitar finishing cover where oil wins and where it does not.
Look at where the flame sits. It runs in tight, even bands across the lower bout and stays in register across the center seam of the veneer, which is a bookmatch that was laid down carefully rather than just laid down. The black hardware is doing real work here too: against a pale, warm, unstained top, black reads as a drawn outline rather than as another color competing with the wood.
Neck dive is caused by the balance point of the instrument sitting on the wrong side of the upper strap button, not by the bass being heavy overall. Mass at the headstock, mainly the tuning machines, sits at the end of a long lever and counts for much more than the same mass in the body. Basses with long scales, light bodies or upper strap buttons placed close to the neck joint are the most prone to it.
They are the most effective single change for it. A set of ultralight bass machines can weigh around half of a conventional set, and that saving comes off the farthest point from the pivot, so it moves the balance point more than a much larger saving anywhere else. They will not cure an extreme case on their own, and a wider strap or a strap button moved back will take it further, but tuners are where to start.
Most full-size aftermarket bass tuners need an 11/16 inch headstock hole, while many kit headstocks arrive drilled to 1/2 inch. Enlarging the hole with a step drill or reamer is a normal part of the swap and is easy to do cleanly. Always confirm the shaft diameter in the tuner spec before ordering, because a hole that is already too big cannot be undone.
Standard-size pickups generally drop straight into standard routes, and on this build the replacements for both the split and the single-coil positions seated without modification to the wood. The risk is not the pickup, it is anything you add to the cavity first. Shielding tape, thick potting wax or foam padding all reduce the opening.
Yes, and it catches people out. Copper shielding tape is roughly 0.05 mm thick, and once you line all four walls of a cavity and overlap the seams you can lose a tenth of a millimeter or more per side. Pickup routes are cut to a close tolerance, so the result is a pickup that suddenly binds. Light sanding or careful trimming of the tape at the edges fixes it.
You can, and it is one of the safer options on a thin veneer. Oil builds almost no film, wets the fiber and brings out the chatoyance of the flame without adding color, so the figure carries the look on its own. It takes considerably longer than a sprayed finish because it goes on in many thin hand-rubbed coats over weeks rather than days.
Bill used the WB Bass Guitar Kit with Flamed Maple Top, Maple Fretboard. If you are weighing a first bass build or a platform to upgrade, the rest of the range is in our bass guitar kits, and flamed maple kits covers the tops.
Guitar finishing 101 · How to choose a guitar finish · Finishing a neck and fretboard · Copper shielding a kit guitar · The P and J bass wiring diagram for this kit · Common mistakes to avoid · Another bass build, in black
The bass is finished, and it is not sitting on a wall.
I've since had the bass strung and tuned so it is indeed stage-ready.
Bill will hand it to his daughter in October. Our thanks to him for letting us follow the build and for writing the fitment notes down in enough detail to be useful to somebody else. He put it better than we could:
Black hardware against the natural wood really contrasts well and resulted in a wonderful instrument my daughter will have for the rest of her life.
Now a question for anyone reading who gigs a bass: what did you change first to get the balance right, and did it work? Tell us in the builder community. If you have fought neck dive on a build, the next person searching for it will find your answer.
Finishing is the one guitar-building step you cannot undo. So Steve Madden practiced on six plywood bodies first, then gave his quilted maple kit five thin coats of Tru-Oil. Here is his method, and how he fixed the binding when it turned yellow.
Doug DeLuca and his sixteen year old son turned a bare quilted maple top into a deep blue burst, and the figure still reads through the darkest part of the rim. Here is the dye versus pigment decision that made it work, why the edges are the darkest part of the guitar, and what you can copy on your own figured top.
Christoph and his son Fionn wanted a deep even black on an open-grained mahogany body with the figure still showing through, and the pores kept drying lighter than the surface. Follow the build from the bare kit to the finished bass, and see how they diagnosed it and what you can copy from their approach.
