Velarian

Quick update. I managed to get the neck holes plugged yesterday. I’m going to try drilling the new holes and mounting the neck on the body tomorrow.

Chrome would be my choice. The plastic knobs look a bit anaemic to me.

Call me obtuse but it’s not clear to me how this actually works 🤔. The things I’ve circled in red below appear to be acting like mini capos clamping the string to the zero and -1(?) frets. If this is the case then is there a mechanism to release each of these to get to Eb and D?

Wow, that’s different! Can we see a closer picture of the headstock please?

Or should it be tomorrow is today?

Not yet. I had to spend the weekend staying with my old mum so didn’t get chance to work on it. However, I was rummaging in her shed checking out my late dad’s stuff and managed to snaffle a nice pillar drill and a workbench which will come in handy when it comes to drilling the new holes, as well as the bridge holes, with some accuracy. I’ve got some 4.5mm dowling which should be just right for plugging the existing holes. I just need to find a quiet moment to sort it out. I’m not in any rush though and I’d rather get my ducks in a row first to minimise the chance of bodging things 😉

I was recently trying to learn the bass line to San Lorenzo from the first PMG album. I managed to nail the first few bars but it turns out it’s a lot harder than my meagre skills will allow for right now. 😟 I first discovered his music in the early eighties when my mate’s brother played the Travels album for us and I’ve been listening ever since. Been fortunate to see him live many times and he’s my absolute favourite musician. Come to think of it I packed in bass playing the first time round not long after - I probably realised I’d never get to that standard of musicianship and gave it up as a bad job 😂

Awesome interview with Pat Metheny here. Just to keep it bass related, there’s a lot of discussion about Jaco too.

I’ve just discovered that the holes on a neck I’m matching to a new body are a couple of mils out and will have to plug and redrill. The neck itself fits the pocket exactly though which is a good thing. In both cases they’re designed to be direct replacements for the original parts but I guess these things are not made to exacting tolerances and even Fender models from different factories will be a little different. Presumably a few mils or so change to the scale length is still within the tolerance of the adjustment available with the bridge saddles?

All great advice thanks. Good point about the thread carrying the glue. I’ll go with a bodge on the nut initially and then fit a new one when the build is finished.

Another problem with the neck is the nut which seems to be excessively filed on the E string. Unless there’s any way to salvage this I’m thinking I need a new nut too?

Thanks. The holes are around 4mm. It almost seems counter-intuitive to make the existing holes bigger but it does make sense to end up a clean hole of a known size to work with. 🙂

I’ve not done any more with this yet other than think about my plan of attack. The next steps are: - 1. Mount the neck 2. Test fit the pickups 3. Sort out the bridge placement to get the alignment with the pickups and neck and the scale length right. So the first challenge with the neck is that existing holes in the heel are just a couple of millimetres different to the holes in the body (the red dot in the picture shows the centre of where the new hole would be). As the new holes would overlap with the existing ones I’m guessing I’ll have to plug them first. Can any one advise on the best way to do this please?

Another Bowie one, with the Pat Metheny Group from soundtrack for The Falcon and the Snowman. This is not America.

This ^^^^ add a black pick guard and bring out that inner JJ Burnell 😉

I had some of those too, I was just about to say they looked like my cowboy pants when I was a kid 😁. Would have been mid-Sixties for me.

That looks like a good bass to start from and a bargain at £60. I’ll be watching with interest. Good luck with the build.

The top pick guard it is then. 👍 My decision to go with tort was two-fold. First, the vintage look and second @Stub Mandrel suggested in the basses on the settee thread that I should have some tort in my line-up. So there you go 😄

Thanks, I’ve just reviewed your thread. I like the idea of using string to get the bridge alignment with the edges of the neck and the pickups.

I’ll probably measure many many times I reckon.

First question to ask you guys: which pick guard should I go with?

Ha! “a fraction of the cost” indeed 😂 what started out as budget project has definitely grown legs. I’m in for a fair bit more than I’d intended. There’s some nice basses in the marketplace which I could have bought and still had change but never mind, the journey will be interesting and I’m sure I’ll learn a lot in the process. I’ve started reading up on bridge placement and measuring scale length etc., so I’ve already improved my knowledge a bit.

I’m sure that the true luthiers amongst you with time-served and well-honed skills will yawn at an imposter pretending to ‘build’ a bass by throwing a few ready made parts together, so apologies in advance to you fine craftsmen. Like many before me, I started off learning some basic set-up stuff and then swapped a few bits out here and there. As a result I ended up with some machine heads a bridge, some pickups, a pick guard and a couple of other bits and thought, all I need is a neck and body and I could put another bass together. I decided to go for a vintage P-Bass look and started to look for a cheap body and neck. I found a used P-style body on eBay which looked OK from the pictures, but when it arrived it was immediately obvious why it was cheap! It was so light I could swear it was made of balsa wood, the pick up routing and the holes for the bridge didn’t line up particularly well with the neck pocket. Never mind I thought, with a bit of filling and fettling I could probably make it work. Getting a cheap neck was less easy and, given that it’s such a key piece of the jigsaw, I thought it was probably worth spending a little more on that. I eventually got a used Fender licensed Might Mite neck which looks pretty good. However the neck wasn’t going to play nicely with the neck pocket on the body and yet more fettling with the body would be needed. As the body was going to be the weak link in this build I decided to abandon it and ended up buying a new Northwest Guitars P-bass body which arrived today. It’s like chalk and cheese and the new body is way better, a real quality piece. The neck fits in the pocket like a hand in a glove. One challenge is that it doesn’t have holes drilled for the bridge so I’ll have to figure out the best way to do that. I’m sure I’ll have many questions when I start to piece things together but for now, here’s all the bits: -

Awesome! I take it you weren’t tempted to do a “Cooking for the (Thai) King” version then? 😉