SO I've always loved the dirty blue color of the RAF's Photoreconnaissance Spitfires. I had one spare board left of the seasoned golden cypress I'd scored from some local downed windbreak trees, and a lead on some nice Indian rosewood neck blanks from a local guy whose family cut them down from their tea plantation in Bali. And then I found some really nice morado fretboard blanks. And went to work... Body on its way... Here's the neck under way. Mahogony filet over the trussrod. This was going to be a veneer fretboard - a la Fender's standard 60's onward 3mm rosewood veneer boards found on many of their basses and guitars, so the neck had to be radiused to 7.25" before clamping and gluing the milled down fretboard. Fretboard on, neck carving time...
Fretting time...low n wide...nickel of course. Of course, one feels honour-bound to add a mahogany skunkstripe to rosewood... Of course, Spitfires were made from aluminum... And the color... And that's one very battle-scarred genuine 1969 Tele Bass pickup! First test flight yields positive results! I figure this'll either get me sued or a job offer from the Custom Shop... I modified a stock top loading bridge to do the stringthrough thing...coupled with 500k pots and 0.01 ceramic cap to give the rosewood neck a touch more top end - through the trusty old Bassman 135 and the two 15's, this baby really does fly right!
That is absolutely killer. Not often that two of my interests collide head on! You did this justice without making it tacky or goofy looking. I like the colour that the Spitfire prototype K5054 was painted, though there is a little disagreement about the actual colour. The original was scrapped (!) but a replica exists at the Tangmere aviation museum here in the UK: From memory they used a Toyota paint to approximate the colour. Some of the ambiguity comes from one written account of the prototype flying, which described the colour as totally different to all other accounts. RAF blues are quite hard to capture anyway, as there were various variants and, from memory, it partially depended on which factory an aircraft rolled out of. The RAF had a colour called 'Sky' that was, if anything, a sort of grey-green-white colour containing no blue pigment.
SWEET pic. Looks like whoever built that baby did a great job of reproducing K5054. A few color pics I have seen of the original K5054 was very similar to that blue - I reckon they've done a pretty good job!