Doing Things Wrong

Stratocaster Micro Bass 1 (1/3)

Eden paddle-head guitar neck converted to bass. Strings are lower four of 5-string set, unwound to fit 25" scale.

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A few build details:

On the left:

  • Probably a Squier body, buffed and polished
  • Eden paddlehead Strat neck, cut to a slightly enlarged guitar headstock profile
  • laser-printed decals, poly finish
  • Chinese zinc-cast bridge, 18mm string spacing to match the neck - eBay
  • GFS Jazz neck pickup
  • Fender Japan P pickup, mounted narrow to match the neck
  • 4-way blade switch - series/parallel
  • passive electronics - bass & treble cut
  • Chinese fake Fender 125-50 roundwound strings ( pretty bad )

I haven't decided what I want to do about the strings yet, but other than that I am quite happy with it. Really fun to play, nice tone - anywhere from P to J, and crazy roar in series mode. Weighs around seven pounds. To mount the bridge and pickups, I filled the tremolo hole and spring cavity with plywood. The bass pickups required some routing. The pickguard is obviously totally custom, and pretty crowded.

To make these strings, start with a 5-string set, and unwind the B down to the necessary length to fit the tuner. That becomes your E. You may also have to do the same for the E/A, the rest should fit.

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This is the angled headstock jig I built from pine scrap, with an already-cut piece of 5" Home Depot maple headstock material attached with clamps. Basically, this jig is a 90-degree square brace, as precise as I could build it. It is square in all three dimensions, the most important being the vertical direction. The final stage of construction of the jig was to smooth all the surfaces on the sander, true up the saw, and then true-up the jig face by shaving it with the saw. You can see that the angle of the headstock is easily selected on the saw. The accuracy of this angle is not critical, as long as you are in the ballpark, anything will work.