Luthiery Laboratories

This body was purchased on eBay from a parted-out guitar. Might have been a Squier, I don't remember. It was in pretty good shape, and I gave it a good polishing. The neck is hand-made, one of my first. The back is hand-picked Home Depot maple, the fretboard is pre-slotted rosewood from StewMac, I hadn't yet worked out how to make my own. If you cut the first two frets off a 34" fretboard, you end up with a 30" scale. That's about the limit with a pre-slotted fretboard though, as you start to run out of frets at the other end. The dots are 1/4" pearl from StewMac, expensive. The frets are probably pre-cut Fender.

Two Stratocaster 30" bass conversions. On the left is the heaviest conversion - re-routed neck pocket, pickup in tremolo hole, bridge at end of body. On the right: Mustang bridge covering tremolo hole, standard Strat pickguard with rail humbuckers. Both eBay bodies, hand-made necks. The one on the left has active electronics.

Both necks are basically a copies of a Bronco. This neck does have an extra-long heel, as it sits about an inch further into the body than usual for a Fender. In the photo above, the second bass has a very similar neck, but mounted in the stock neck pocket. You could also widen-out the neck pocket to fit a standard-width bass neck; then you could use a standard-width bass bridge.

Update:

The spoke nut truss rod makes it easy to dial in just the right amount of neck bow, and then set the action at the bridge. ( Did I mention that the truss rod slides right out should it ever break? All truss rods should be that way. ) Turns out the brass nut can be very buzzy if you don't get the shape of the slots just right, and brass may be soft for a metal, but it still takes a lot more effort to file than plastic. The two-pickup bass nails both the Jazz and Precision sounds, as well as both series and parallel combinations, exactly what I was aiming for.