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AEB-2 & AUB-2 Scroll Basses
Design and Construction Details:
Fabricating The Hardware...Page 2


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The bridge and the bridge saddle blocks are machined from aluminum. The aluminum is soft enough that it seats nicely against the strings, and seems to add some high frequency "singing" overtones to the sound. The design is similar to the original Ampeg AEB-1 bridge, but is a little thicker and more solid.

The bridge body is cut from rectangular bar stock on a milling machine. The saddle blocks start out as square bar stock, and are turned to the cone shape in a lathe.


The pockets in a bridge are being cut in a milling machine.



A stack of partially completed bridges.







A box full of bridge saddle blocks after machining.


The bridge cover is brass, chrome plated. It's almost a copy of the original Ampeg bridge cover, but it's lower in height to be more comfortable.
The blanks are cut from 14ga brass sheet, and then bent to shape in this double-sided forming die that I built. After drilling the mounting holes and smoothing the edges, they are polished and sent to be plated.


The neck plate is a 14ga brass plate with a 0.200" layer of ebony epoxied onto it. I glue them up in strips of five, then cut them apart and drill and counterbore the holes. The external dimensions are trimmed on a belt sander, while checking in a gauging fixture. Finally, as shown here, the top surface is polished, stained, and coated with Stewart-MacDonald's fingerboard oil.

The pickup housing is made up from four blocks of ebony. The center two blocks are cut to hold the coils at the correct angles and spacing to match the radius of the strings. The blocks are laminated together with epoxy using plastic pins to keep them in alignment. It's then machined, shaped, and polished, and coated with stain and oil like the fingerboard. The coils, which I have made up by Seymour Duncan, mount to the inside with brass clips.

A stack of pickup housings, after gluing up the basic blocks.

A completed pickup housing, looking from underneath, with the coils installed.