You hand-make guitars? I love you..haha. It looks beautiful!

Yes, I do

And thanks!

Very nice. I like the styling on the pickguard and the colour of the fingerboard. What pickups are those?

I've been building amps here and there for a while, and I've been thinking about trying my hand at the luthier thing. You ever built a tube amp?

I wound the pickup bobbins myself on an old drill press with some pickup wire I had lying around. Those are Gibson bobbins and covers. They have Alnico 2 magnets and are wound to around 8K each. The magnet is a little stronger in the bridge pickup. 
I've built a couple of amps, yes- a Marshall 18-watt clone and a 50-watt 1987 clone. The 18 watter was a real bitch and its lead dress was a bitch to get right. Wiggl;e the feedback loop wire and it went to hell fast.

I've made a super-champ, a hi-octane(ax84), a home stereo/pa, and a battery-powered tiny half-watt combo amp. Lots of transistor stuff here and there, cloned some vintage FX and designed a few of my own. My favorite project so far has been the hi-octane. It started out as a 5ish watt mid-high gain amp with 2 12ax7s and an el84 power tube. After tons of tinkering I added a 6l6 for the power amp, vibrato(footswitchable), marshall-style FX loop(footswitch), footswitch to bypass preamp stages, extra preamp stages, etc...No NFB loop. Suprisingly low noise for a single-ended amp too, but that took hours of lead dress tinkering. I forgot to let the caps drain once while I was doing it. Ouch.

I have plans to clone either a Bassman or AC-30. Either one should turn out fun.

Did you scrap the winding on old Gibson pickups or buy the bobbins and covers alone and wind? How did those turn out?

I've had the bobbins in these pickups since the '70s. The donors were a pair of Gibsons from 1977 or sothat I had completely dissected in the early '80s in a fit of boredom. ALl the metal parts except the covers and wire came from those pickups.
I've seen the insides of an AC-30. too much work for me.  The Bassman is very similar to a Marshall JMP-45 with some small changes in the phase inverter, rectifier,  and tone stack.  From my experience I think most of the 'Marshall' tone comes from the phase inverter, as the 18-watt uses the same one as the 50-watter, and they sound really close to the same amp,  and  none of the other sections are similar, they don't even use the same tubes.

I did a little research on the Bassman, and it turns out that the JMP-45 was  designed as an essentially exact clone of the Bassman with British-equivalent parts. Maybe the 'Marshall' tone would be better described as the 'metric' tone?

Also, a huge thing to consider is the AC frequency. In Europe its 50 Hz, 60Hz in the U.S. I read an article about an electric engineer that did his Ph.D. dissertaion on the Bassman's distinctive sound. He managed to keep power supply 'sag' and all of the things that were held in lore to give the Bassman tone, but removed the 60Hz AC hum that plagues Bassmans and other tube amps. The result was a very mediocre amp that sounded nothing like a Bassman. The effect of the hum can be very distinctly seen in an oscilloscope with the right settings.

The rectifier in the JMP-45 was designed for 50Hz, and as such probably sounds different in the U.S. on 60Hz just as a Bassman would in Europe. I think the differences in the rectifiers would have quite a bit to do with it, but I only have evidence that suggests that, none that proves. I do know that the Bassman feel comes from its rectifier/PT, and since the JMP-45 is a modified clone, it probably does too. It would certainly be something interesting to experiment with later on.

Also, I'm planning to build a frettless bass by hand soon, with a neck contoured like a violin's so that it can be bowed as well as plucked. I'm going to have to custom make my pickup to get it to fit the arc the way I want. Any advice?

The 50 vs 60 cycle  thing isn't viable because you'd hear the difference between an American-recorded album and a European-recorded one in the amps and sound gear. You don't hear it. At least I don't, and I've used the same amp in the US and the UK and there's been no difference. Most of the 1966 and later Marshalls have had voltage selectors in them. I've even seen JMP-45s with them. But I have seen very strong evidence that the phase inverter controbutes a great deal to the Marshall tone. Wire up a Bassman with a Marshall phase inverter and see what happens. Then to test, put a post-phase-inverter master volume in it, and then remove that and put in a pre-phase-inverter master volume. You'll hear what I mean.

Tube vs solid-state rectifiers don't affect tone so much as signal compression within it. I prefer a solid-state rectifier .

For your bass build, I'd strongly suggest using an 18-volt preamp with a piezo under-bridge pickup. Use an acoustic bass bridge with a bone saddle and block it up to the height you need if you have to. A humbucker under the strings won't pick up all the nuances of tone that bowing introduces.  I recommend the D-Tar Timberline preamp and pickup combo.

I'll listen to some of my old records and see if I agree with you on that. I do prefer solid state rectifiers also. I hate seeing tubes wasted in places that don't make 'tube sounds. All of my amps have silicon diode rectifiers.

The piezo looks promising. I wasn't planning to use a humbucker, but tool a bobbin/polepieces for a single-coil, arched to fit the strings. At the moment I have all sorts of hardware from a dirt cheap POS bass I canabalized, and I think I'll use all of that to build the first one, experiment, and then look at more high-end hardware and a better build. I'm planning to do something very similar in the guitar range also, and I was considering either another of my custom single-coils or a Fernandes Sustainer pickup. I've seen Steve Vai use one of those to great effect in a frettless guitar.

On another note, I looked at some of your stuff on flickr and I have to ask, where do you get your wood?

I haven't bought wood in years, I used to get most of it at a place here in Dallas that's since gone out of business. Will need some again at some point, I will find a source when I need it