Doing Things Wrong

Stratocaster Bass 1 (1/3)

Well, it's that time of year again, time to renew the web hosting. And for those of you that don't know, that has become a lot more expensive than it used to be. Fifty dollars a year is now several hundred. Not to mention the price of domain names has gone up ten-fold.

And I just found out that the nice folks at PayPal disabled all my Support buttons, and I never got a notice (although that may be my fault.) In any case, it is all working again now, so if you would like to make a small donation to help defray these costs, it would be greatly appreciated.

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.

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Note how the pickguard has turned brown after a few years

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.

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Here is how to add a no-damage thumb rest to any Fender bass. This one is made from a piece of maple scrap and two SS screws from the hardware store. You can wrap the original screws in tape and store them in the control cavity. Walnut also makes nice thumb rests. Just a few minutes on the belt sander.

Printed from luthierylabs.com