With the electronics all fixed and the body nice and cleaned up, I turn my attention to the fretboard.
It's in good shape, except the frets themselves are a bit corroded. I just take some 0000 steel wool to them to polish them up a bit. I have some 'fretboard protectors from Stewart-MacDonald that are great - they just expose the fret itself so you don't put any marks on the fretboard.
As I said, the frets are in good shape - with very little or no wear, except a big ding on the 3rd fret. I briefly think about leveling it out, but I don't - mainly because I don't think it affects the way it will play.
This has been a surprisingly quick fix up. I did all the work over the course of about 2 hours.
Now ve bolt ze neck back on. No problems at all, and I have to note that the bass has a nice tight fit between the neck and the neck pocket.
Just a little bit of lemon oil on the fingerboard to condition it. I mean a tiny bit - it goes a long way.
I go to restring it with GHS medium gauge Boomers (you may have seen the package on the workbench...) and find that the low E string's winding is too large to go into the bridge. Doh.
I've seen this sort of slight mismatch before - a lot of Fender copy instruments don't conform exactly to the original spec. About a year ago, I worked on an old Strat copy for a colleague. It had a 3-way pickup switch - the old style. I went to put a modern 5-way Fender replacement on it, and found out the slot in the pickguard was too short! So I just left the old switch on.
In this case, though, I want to put this gauge of strings on. I wound up just reaming out the hole a bit with a 1/8" drill bit. No problem at all.
Then I was able to do the rest of the setup - a bridge height adjustment and intonation. I didn't take pictures of this - I've documented this before. Works the same on a bass as it does on a guitar.
Here's a beauty shot of the finished bass on the workbench. Looks pretty cool. I just put some electrical tape under the pickguard to cover the second 'mystery' switch hole.
The bass sounds pretty darn good and plays really well. I was able to lower the action quite a bit so it's real nice to play. But boy, is it huge! I don't play bass a lot so the scale and the gauge of the strings is always a surprise to me. The scale is actually twice the length of a tenor ukulele (34" vs. 17") and about 8.5 inches longer than a Tele or Strat (25.5"), so it's a big jump up.
The bass will hopefully be in the hands of its new owner soon!
Nice job and very informative - thank you! That 'mystery switch' is for built-in wireless, which this model originally came with. Did the body appear to be solid wood or plywood? Cheers, Paul
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