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Fender James Jamerson 62 Precision - limited run?
- Thread starter facetsquared
- Start date
I've got no axe to grind against Fender or this JJ bass, but I just got a $299 Epiphone EB-0 from China with a bolt on neck and its absolutely solid and shipped in a cardboard box. I'm assuming this $3000 bass comes in a case? There really is no excuse and 100% it left Corona like that.
You have way too much faith in Fender QCYes yes. It certainly couldn’t be the 70 + year old design, where 90% of the pocket on the treble side has no support, would be a factor in shipping. It couldn’t be the wood dehydrating and rehydrating as it shifts across numerous weather zones. Certainly not. What am I thinking?
This is what it comes down to, sure you can say the neck shifted in transit etc but Fender has terrible QC so it is way more likely it left the factory that way, neck alignment probably isn't even part of their QC checks, for some reason some people seem to think this is acceptable on a 3k bass.
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3-4 piece is my guess. Plenty of early stuff has 4 pieces to get all the way out to the top of the bouts. It all comes down to the planing of pieces from raw planks. On videos I’ve watched, people are planing all four dimensions of the lumber and if there is a flaw they need to plane away, they might end up with a narrow board in a set and have to add a thin strip to the edge to have enough span to cut the body blank. The thin strips we usually never see because paint or the black rim on SBs like the JJ here.
You’ve put a bee in my bonnet. I’m at home from knee surgery Tuesday so I’ve racked up videos of custom shop.
Final assembly is a crew of women. They are screwing necks on BY HAND, no air or electric drivers. That pretty much says to me those necks are not cranked down by gorillas. If they move a fraction, blame those nice women that built it for you.
Also a CS instrument sees only rough body and neck shaping by CNC. All the tummy cuts, edge rounding, neck shaping and various IS MANUALLY COMPLETED. Yes, Tummy cuts are still roughed in by hand on a bandsaw! YES, even the rounded over edges are done by hand and checked with small radius templates until it’s right.
Hours and hours of manual labor. Skilled people deserve good wages. Final cost is much higher than the 80% machine made instruments on the regular line.
Logic and reason supported by empirical evidence. Not emotion.
You parrot the BS from naysayers without any evidence.
Read my above review of CS tour videos on the process
Final assembly is done by a crew of women in CS. They are screwing necks on by hand with screwdrivers.
Chinese instrument necks are screed on with air or electric drivers. Tons of torque compared to a nice skilled woman’s hand in the CS
Logic and reason supported by empirical evidence. Not emotion.
No parroting here, I have first hand experience of there QC, unfortunately I quite like their products so I'm stuck with trying several to get a good one any time I buy a Fender
Wait...who says the customer has to do any work? Why not notify the seller and have them, or an authorized repair tech do it. And that's assuming there actually is something askew. Are we to believe that these basses come without a warranty?
I definitely get the angst over an expensive guitar arriving in anything less than perfect playing condition, though. OTOH, $3K ain't what it used to be. All things considered, the price is about what I'd expect for a Ltd Ed USA Fender. I'd never pay that for one, though!
I bought a bass from CME recently where they rave about their checklist before it ships… got the bass and the nut was not cut right because the A and D string were floating and CME refused to accept a return. So now I gotta try to fix by carving with the string or pay more money to have it fixed.Wait...who says the customer has to do any work? Why not notify the seller and have them, or an authorized repair tech do it. And that's assuming there actually is something askew. Are we to believe that these basses come without a warranty?
I definitely get the angst over an expensive guitar arriving in anything less than perfect playing condition, though. OTOH, $3K ain't what it used to be. All things considered, the price is about what I'd expect for a Ltd Ed USA Fender. I'd never pay that for one, though!
So really these box stores may say they check before they ship but you cannot trust them so Fender really should have the final look over before they go out in my opinion for the expensive US made ones. Surely they have an uber luthier on hand if they’re building the things but maybe the demand is great and they just don’t have the time.
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I just got this bass together today. I got the James Jamerson neck from Franklin Guitar Works in Nashville as a potential B stock. You can see the Nitro that wasn't sprayed correctly. They stamp "used" really small on the back of the headstock and license a couple retailers to sell them. This bass feels and sounds magical, there is mojo in that JJ neck for sure. This is my Poor man's Pino, with a JJ neck. Legendary Thump and it's not done.
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I’m not much of a historian. Would this be around the same period?
I had several Squiers shipped from Indonesia to Poland's dry winter (in single cardboard boxes with no gigbag and no padding) and every nut was centered, every neck was perfectly aligned and the strings were aligned between the pole pieces, and none of those necks ever developed fret sprout.
Conversely, every MIM I bought over the years has had at least one of those issues. MIAs and CS Fenders also seem to be affected.
Physics and the realities of shipping and handling notwithstanding, it is possible to build good guitars even for cheap.
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In an ideal world, that bass would have never left the factory.
In a less than ideal world, CME would have sent it back to Fender.
In the real world, they sold you the dud and moved on with their life.
Really surprised to see CME behaving like that given their reputation (and they're not even a box store but a single location) but also not surprised at all. At the end of the day they're all snake oil salesmen and nothing else.
It’s just the nut and maybe superficial marks showing it had previously been bought but yea they were pretty rude to me. Like they don’t have returns. They even made an excuse they had packed it up when I had canceled previously and they gave me grief about having to unbox it but when I finally got it and unboxed it.. it had minimum packing lol. Took me all but 20 secs to slide it outta the box. I have come to really dislike music stores because of the egos and attitudes. They blame the customer always. Not all but most.
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Yeah sorry mate. As I previously said, Fender tour videos reveal final assembly necks being bolted on, by a predominantly female crew at the final assembly work benches. They slide the neck in, the screws are placed and pass unimpeded through the body and only thread into the neck. The body holes are larger than the screw diameter.
I have 3 Squiers. 3. All of them have the screws driven through the body into the neck. And the screws have cut threads through the body holes. The only way to do that is to clamp the neck on and use a power tool to drive it through. Like screwing together house framing… the entering screw cuts threads through both piece as they are joined.
My Fenders FACTORY body holes ARE LARGER DIAMETER THAN THE SCREWS AND THE SCREWS PASS RIGHT THROUGH, ONLY THREADING INTO THE NECK HOLES. That method leaves the ability for the neck to be realigned by slightly loosening the four screws one turn and shift the neck because the screw are loose in the body holes.
Neck alignment was impossible on my 3 Squiers until I drilled the body holes out slightly such that the screws would slip through unimpeded by the threads cut by “forced” in screws at Asian factories. I did this because I wasn’t happy with alignment and when I loosened the screws, the neck wouldn’t move. I took one apart and couldn’t immediately identify why. So it reassembled. When I retightened the screws they threaded through the body (not drop through like my Fenders) and once the screw hit the neck holes it didn’t catch a neck thread immediately and the scre point pushed the neck up leaving a gap between the neck and pocket. I had to remove the screws and either clamp it, or drill the body holes oversized, which I did because it’s the superior method.
My Epiphone Tbird was the same… screws just driven in through body and neck. Zero play in the joint. Drilled that out too but it has closed side pocket unlike the Fendrr design that leaves 90% of the treble side of the pocket without a wall… the neck can shift easily. Intentionally or by being bumped around, as shipping does.
So, apples and oranges as far as final assembly is concerned. This is not QC it is a different method of introducing neck screws. Logic and reason. No emotion involved.
Fender hate dog-piles are so exhausting. And for the first 25 years I played bass, I never even touched a Fender. The next 25 years to today I’ve played bass has been bliss since I turned away from coffee table basses to Fender clean, clear tone and feel and timeless design.
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