Abalone T-Bird - 'Lenore'

November 14, 2020

A longtime repair & setups customer of mine hit me up over the summer about making a left-handed T-bird style bass, with an abalone top and a P-bass style neck. At the time I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to do this, but I knew it was possible. Definitely felt like I was building something cool with this one.

With a little research and luck, I found a supplier for 9"x5" abalone sheets.

The bass required 6 sheets total.

The first thing I did was make the templates. Another area where I got lucky was that a friend and housemate Dave let me borrow his right-handed T-bird for the duration of the job, which was a huge help!

Onto the neck, which ended up being a 2-piece quartersawn, which worked great not just cosmetically, but for stability as well.

Neck stock is milled and being prepped for gluing.

Neck stock being glued up, while clamped to a piece of flat oak. The straighter it can be glued, the less issues there will be down the road.

Re-sawing the body wings. We have since upgraded our saw to a model with a 90-degree table, and while this “shim-the-fence” method works, it’s no longer in use.

Body wings are rough cut to size.

Body wings with neck stringer.

Now for the fingerboard. This was cut from the unused portion on the back of the neck. Thus it is a 2-piece.

Slotted the fretboard and set it aside for later.

Now it’s time to cover the body wings in abalone. I added a couple coats of finish onto the abalone, to add stability while routing the binding ledges, which is the next step.

Body binding ledges are routed.

Routing the trussrod channel and headstock.

Rough-cut the neck, and routed the binding ledge for the headstock.

Gluing the binding to the body. After steam-bending the binding, it is glued onto the body ledge with wood glue and held in place with reinforced packing tape.

Same thing with the headstock. Trussrod fits into the channel nicely.

With the binding on, it’s time for the fingerboard to be glued onto the neck.

Once the fingerboard is on, the next step is carving the neck.

Carving the neck.

Coating the neck with naphtha gives me a pretty good idea of what the neck will look like with finish on it. Notice the subtle flaming and hints of blue throughout the ambrosia patterns.

The neck carving process starts with carving several benchmarks into the wood, constantly checking to make sure the thickness and profile are correct. I usually get my benchmarks to within 0.004" of the final neck thickness, since a few thousandths of an inch will be removed during the final sanding process.

Benchmarks are done, now it’s just a matter of connecting the benchmarks, and checking with a straight edge to eliminate peaks and valleys.

It’s pretty close here. The neck heel will be cleaned up once the body wings are glued on.

Moving on to the inlays. Tape isn’t necessary here, I just used it to help me visualize where the inlays will be, especially helpful since this is a lefty.

Routing the inlays. The blocks clamped to the neck are all you really need, as far as templates go.

Inlay slots are done. Now for the hard part of inlaying the shell.

Since the shell is so thin, I had to mount it to a 1/16" thick piece of spruce, then cut it to size and inlay them into the slots. This was especially tough, since a small piece of abalone had to be glued to the edges and recessed, for the side marker function.

Now that the shell is in, a piece of masking tape is applied to the side of the board, to act as a reservoir for the glue. This is necessary due to the space left open on the side of the board, to accommodate the side markers.

3 days later, with the CA glue finally dry, the surface of the fingerboard can now be radiused, and with it, the inlays.

Body wings are doweled and glued.

Now the heel area can be cleaned up.

Heel is trimmed and body edges are rounded over.

Routing the control cavity, with an MDF template that I modified slightly from the original.

In order to protect the super-thin abalone sheets, and maximize the opalescence of the shell, the top of the headstock and body wings were poured with 3/16" tabletop epoxy, then level sanded and buffed.

The tape was used to keep the epoxy in, and thick enough to where the meniscus (due to the high surface tension of the epoxy) wasn’t an issue. The final epoxy thickness came to about 1/8".

The epoxy is levelled flush with the maple binding.

Next up, the rear headstock inlay. The customer wanted the name “Lenore” inlaid into the back of the headstock. Step 1 was make a printout of various fonts, in various sizes, then selecting the correct one.

After tracing the letters onto the headstock, I used a razor and traced out the letters, one at a time.

This process took me about 3 hours and over a dozen razor blades.

The letters are all cut out to a depth of approximately 3/32".

Since the abalone was way too thin to cut into the shapes of letters, I had to go another route. For these inlays I decided on fire opal powder. Here it is mixed with CA glue.

Here you can see my custom clamping deck, to keep the back of the headstock level while the CA filler dries.

Inlay is scraped and sanded flush, with a layer of naphtha on top, as a preview.

And finally the front headstock inlay. As always, I stamp “Manitou” into a piece of rosewood, fill it with wood filler, sand it back then inlay it into the headstock. Since it is slightly recessed below the surface, I fill the remaining surface with epoxy, and sand it level.