too much talking, not enough bass building. . .
Time for some more work on #7. Clamped up the neck to set alignment and drill new holes.
The neck plate seemed to be stuck on this bass, but some may consider that to be a "feature". I didn't stress about it. . . 3/16" hole going in. . .
Neck pocket and neck with pretty new holes. I shimmed the neck while clamping it in place because I knew this bass would need it from where the strings were sitting when it came out of the box. This way, the neck screws will fit a little better than if I shimmed it after the holes were drilled.
I was trying to figure out a way to make the scariest operation in the entire build a little less scary, and may have come up with something. What scares me most is how the drill bit walks a little when I drill for inserts and not always predictably. The walking is mitigated somewhat by using a faster RPM when drilling, but that just makes things even scarier and quite exciting as the hole gets punched in really fast. I looked at how clean the initial neck holes were because the body was serving as a guide for the drill bit, and figured I could use one of my scraps as a guide. . . and it worked really well. I kindof eyeballed the neck screw angle (remember this is an SX) and since my guide hole is a little bit angled as well, I could roughly match them up. This ended up working really well. . . no more walking. . . and much less scary.
The resulting holes are nice and clean. They are also a bit tighter than hand-drilled so the inserts fit a tighter.
A little grease to lube up the threads. This really helps things go together smoothly and lets you torque down the neck better. Plus, it puts less stress on the insert threads if you need to dis-assemble/re-assemble the instrument.
Neck is set . . . I only have 4 more 1 1/2" oval head screws, so it's going to be time to restock soon.
Pickup, neck, and bridge alignment is good.
I then stripped the bass and leveled the frets and then crowned/polished them. This neck was difficult to level. There were a few dips and humps going on and I had to remove quite a bit of fret material. The 12th fret was the low one here. This is also the neck I had to do that fret replacement on. One thing to note is the Stewmac frets are harder than the stock SX ones. I forgot to take in-process fret level pics, but the neck ended up nice and flat. . . I double checked this one a lot with the fret rocker to make sure I didn't have any surprises like on #5. Everything checks out and this one should set up great. On a sad note, I killed my cheap Ebay diamond fret file. It's lost too many diamond particles and no longer cuts without significant effort. The tool worked pretty decently for 4 basses, so if you're wanting to do 1 or 2 basses, it might not be such a bad option, but for me, it's a total bummer because I've got ~10 more to go before this show's over. I'm going to order the one I should have got in the beginning from Stewmac.
If all goes well, I should be able to finish this tomorrow. I need to shield it, install the Nordstrand NP4, wire it up, re-assemble, and set up. This will be good because I'll have a bass with the 10% hotter NP4 as well as the stock one, so I can go back and forth to compare. . . which is always helpful.
