Crazy story.
There is definitely something odd going on... my guess is that the neck doesn't belong to that body, which is why everything is all wonky.
You can see on the front of the bass where the neck sits in the neck pocket... the neck should be flush to the top of the body there and it looks like it's above by an 1/8" at least.
Does the body have a serial number stamped by the heel?
The neck is high because I have had a shim put in to raise it as such. The neck was flush, BUT the bridge (both the original, and the replacement) saddles had to be lowered to the max to get the action even anywhere near usable, and even that was a 'high action'. Something was not right Like the neck itself was not thick enough at the base, so the pocket was cut deeper.
The line that runs down the body where the two halves join was used to route the pickups etc, but that line is not straight, it curves off slightly to towards the location of the knobs. This means the pickups are not actually in line with each other. The Neck pup is in perfect line with the neck, the brig pick up sits about 4mm over to the right, and the brigade itself was another 3mm further to the right - But all lined up centre to the body join.
This was not detected as the Wilkinson bridge had fully moveable saddles and so they were lined up with the neck perfectly, but the baseplate of the bridge was way off to the side. The challenge was finding a bridge big enough to cover all the holes, whilst sitting dead centre, the TransTone was the only commercially available one that would cut it. The pickups being misaligned does not seem to be an issue output wise, though once the finger ramp is put in between them it becomes obvious that they are not in line with each other.
The neck itself has a tiny hairline crack just outside the pocket. This was from the wrong neck bolt being put in the wrong hole (front 2 bolts are shorter than the back two - and they were mixed up by a previous owner), so the longer bolt was forced into the wrong hole, and pushed the neck to split a tiny bit. This also caused the fingerboard to bump directly above the screw. Screws now put in corruptly, fingerboard sanded and sufficient force applied to the neck to know that that 'split' is not going to be an issue. it's rock solid still IMO, though the neck as a whole is quite sensitive to tension and temperature.
There is a serial number, though it's quite hard to read as the lacquer is thick. I think it is 9408265, though the least 2 numbers are a pain to read!
When the bass came to me, before I did any work, I actually emailed Zon via the website to find out if there was any reason for the off-line pickups and bridge etc, and to find out about it's history, but I didn't get a reply (was before I found this thread!).
While I have you - Any idea what screws are used for the pickups? One is threaded and I'd like to replace, ideally with black ones, though any fresh bolts would be good. I have purchased 3 sets of different bolts and non of them match the thread inserts in the body. It's similar to an M4, but with a tighter thread, and the screw heads need to be tiny to fit inside the holes of the pickups. I'm guessing it's a US sizing, and harder to get here in the UK.
Thanks!
Shep
