I’ve been seriously slack with my practicing in the last couple of years. I miss playing a 4 string big time. So I decided to fix up my first bass in the hopes I pick it up more often to practice.
This is my first bass. I bought it around ’96 in a used shop.I was a guitarist before that. It was supposed to be an early 90’s Japan Squier but a few things on it have obviously been switched, it wasn’t the original body or tuners when I got it. The neck was also crap and the action was really high. It was not a nice bass to play at all.
About a year ago I decided to pull out the fretboard and fix the neck problem, I discovered a build-up of wood under the f’board and shaved it away. At the same time I made a new bone nut and shaved the sides of the neck to give it a Jazz bass width as I don’t like P-bass width. Here’s the original thread showing what I did
Screwing around with my Squier P
The final result wasn’t that great as the truss rod was shot anyway. It wasn’t that bad but the action was still higher than what I prefer to have so never used it much after that. So a couple of days ago I decided to fix it for good and get a decent playing instrument.
The first thing was to change the truss rod. The original rod was a compression truss rod fit from the back of the neck. Removing it from the back is a lot more complicated than from under the fretboard as would have to rout out the skunk stripe very neatly, switch the rod and fit another skunk stripe that fits *perfectly* into the back of the neck. That wasn’t worth the trouble, so I did a “down and dirty” job. I wanted to get in and get out fast and have a decent playing bass without spending too much time in this. So I went after the truss rod from under the fretboard.
First step was to unglue the fretboard. Lots of steam, a knife and about 5 minutes of work and it was out.
You can see from the second pic how much the truss rod had sunk inside the neck. I then grabbed my chisel and mallet and started knocking some wood away from the truss rod to take it out. It took about 5 minutes for me to think “screw that” and reach for the trusty ol’ laminate trimmer. I had a good idea how deep the rod was by then so I could rout in very light passes to reach the rod.
Spare truss rod anyone?
I installed a two-way rod with adjustment at the body end so I drilled a new hole at the bottom of the neck and got a 2nd grade Cocobolo fingerboard blank that was lying in my shop for some time. I wasn’t going to use it for a customer’s bass because of the sap wood in it so figured I might as well use it in this one. I also decided to leave as much sap wood in it just for the hell of it to give it a particular look. At the same time I added a 21st fret to the bass.
I then did a decent fret job on it and set it up. That part probably took longer than anything else as it’s the most important for the playability.
I oiled the fretboard and put the bass together to verify it. I’m pretty happy with the result, the fingerboard looks a lot nicer than what I was imagining it would be and certainly gives a different look from a stock P bass.
The second pic shows the 12” radius, the new shiny frets and how cool the grain of the wood is.
The next step is to now wind a new P pickup for it and wire in my Aguilar OBP-1 for kick ass sounds to go with the kick ass looks.
That one is for tomorrow or the day after.
Strangely enough, a woodchuck must have sneaked in my house and did this rout when I wasn't watching 
...rear rout controls cavity, of course...
