Wooden Fender Bass Spatula

Lately, a growing number of my friends are becoming enthusiastic cooks. This calls for gifts (that may get me invited for dinner sometime). A musician myself (as most of my cooking friends are), I had the idea for this very recognizable spatula. It is a simple build, and it took me around 1.5 hours to complete the whole thing.

I'll try it out as soon as possible, and will update with some more pictures from the kitchen.

My english is far from perfect, and I will take no offence in corrections! If there are things that are not clear or make no sense, I'd be happy to be corrected and update the instructable...

Beech is a very good wood for kitchen utensils, since the tanning agents aren't posing any problems or bad aromas while cooking. Furthermore, the swelling and shrinking due to humidity should not be enough to tear the wood. I planed strips of beech down to about 4.7mm thickness and looked for a part in which the grain is at an angle of about 45 degrees relative to the surface (this should help to not get tears in the spatula).

I thank google for a picture of a fender jazz bass (yes, I admit, I am a bass man) and scaled it to the correct size (75mm in width). After printing the picture, i adjusted the width of the neck to make the spatula a bit sturdier and taped the picture onto the wood strip.

I used a scroll saw (please correct me, if this is not a scroll saw! Technical terms are a bit tricky sometimes...) to saw the shape as accurately as possible. I don't enjoy sanding very much and this is the easiest way to avoid a lot of sanding. When necessary, i re-tape the picture to the wood, so it won't flap around.

To create the angled surface on the business end of the spatula, I used a grinding disc machine (again, I'd be happy to know the proper name of this machine). This part is quite tricky, and especially the angled grinding has to be done quite careful.

To get really nice and smooth edges and surfaces, I sanded everything first with 120 grain and then 240. I took care to sand the edges as clean as possible, so while cooking there will be no distractions. Using a sanding block, the surfaces got a nice smooth finish which brightend the color of the wood up a bit.

I like simple and low-key gadgets, but I couldn'r resist to add the fender-logo on the head of the bass. I tested my branding-iron on some scraps of beech and drew the logo in pencil on the spatula. Once i felt confident enough, i branded the fender-logo into the wood.

There's a lot of details I could add, but I stopped at this point, since it looks really nice like that (I think)!

I can't wait to use the spatula in the kitchen and will update this instructable as soon as I know how it works. Thanks for reading and I hope this will get copied for many kitchens all around the world!!!