Guitar Blog

The Project: Short-scale bass guitar - Pt 5: We can rebuild it!

UPDATE: Having applied five coats of the All In One finish to both the neck and the body and having built up quite a luxuriant rich-coloured finish, I decided to re-bolt the neck back in place, and have begun to add the hardware, e.g. the machine heads. I would add all the hardware, but am undecided if I want to put the old bridge back on, or whether to buy a new Fender-style bridge (in which case, would I need to fill in the holes for the old bridge?).

It would also have been nice to have added a second pickup such as a jazz bass pickup in the treble position, but this would mean (a) buying the pickup (expensive) and (b) routing a cavity in the body to accommodate it. I think that for this project what I'm going to do is to leave it as a retro-piece, which just the single neck pickup.

One very real problem that I have yet to address is the Big Hole in the front of the control cavity. Someone - a previous owner - had butchered this bass in an attempt to fit a Stratocaster-style recessed jack-plug socket. The only problem being that they couldn't actually fir this inside the control cavity, so they flipped it over so that it wasn't recessed by protruded outwards from the body! What a bodge job.

Needless to say, I do not intend reinstalling this socket. A regular jack socket, mounted flush to the body should do nicely. Only, I have the Big Hole to contend with. So, I suppose I ought to mount the new socket on a plate of some kind. I might be able to buy something, or perhaps cut myself one from a piece of wood and stain it the same colour as the body.