The new bass design is really big, and it needs a really big mold. Normally I make acoustic guitar molds out of MDF, but with a body this big I decided to do a plywood one. I got this idea when I visited the Taylor factory a few years ago. I saw that the molds for their basses were plywood, with spacers between the layers to decrease the weight. The resulting structure is still plenty strong, while making it much easier to work with.

I started out my tracing the mold patterns onto a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood, then roughing them out with a sabre saw. Then I trimmed each piece to within 1/8″ of the pattern line on the band saw. Next I’ll screw each one of the rough pieces to the pattern and flush-cut them on the router table. I made 5 of the upper/bass-bout patterns and 7 of the lower/treble bout patterns, since the body has an asymmetrical cross-section that’s deeper on one side than the other.

Posted by Brian Goode on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 10:14 pm.