Sorry about the medical thing, I get it, just lost my mom last month. Please, no condolences ya'll, sometimes that brings back the grief.
So many questions, is that a stock Warmoth neck build, or did you use the select wood option? Is the body from that Ebay site? What weight is it? How are you going to move the PUPs? Are you done with the VTVT experiment, or are you going to run it VVT given that the Embassies are VBT? Sorry, that's it for now.
This one is not a Warmoth neck build.
I’ve used those in the past for necks and found the special wood builds to be top notch quality but way over priced. My cost goal on this bass is to complete it for the market price of a new VP or less. Basically, I’m tired of waiting for Eppi to put out a VP NR, so I’m doing it myself. The neck is an EBay purchase from China and costs about one seventh of what Warmoth would charge ($80 delivered vs $575). It looks to be good quality, no warps, no humps, no twists, truss seems to work good, frets finished nicely, no sprout, nice wood grain and finish, I’ll probably roll the edges a bit more, fits the bass body like a tight glove.
The body is from Rosser guitars on eBay.
The down side with Rosser is he doesn’t seem to want to do anything custom, at all, under any circumstances. I asked for specific pup locations, no go. I offered to pay full price for a body with pup route delete, control knob hole delete, and bridge screw hole deletes, even that was a no go. So word to the wise - it’s a great looking body, very nice wood and perfect neck pocket, very high quality but zero flexibility on layout. Fortunately the bridge pup route is exactly where I wanted it. I will move the neck pup route closer to the bridge, but that’s not an issue since it’s all under the pickguard. I plan on using a VP two part bridge so I’ll have to fill the bridge drilling he did, but again that’s not a problem since I’ll be going with an opaque painted finish not a transparent stain. Delivered cost was a very decent $120.
The control pot drilling he provides dictates a three knob layout.
I’m looking at how best to do that with a two pickup bass, right now I’m leaning towards a stacked vol/tone pot for each pickup (by far the best control system I’ve ever used on a bird) and then address it’s one shortcoming by routing the output to a master stacked pot where the top knob is master volume control and the bottom knob is a dummy. This would theoretically allow me to set the proper volume and tone for each individual pup and then control the output volume from there with just one knob.
The Epiphone VP pickups, spacers, trim rings, two part bridge, strap pins, and output jack cost a total of about $150. Yanked from a $250 embassy donor. The excellent condition remaining embassy husk (which is for sale) will be sold for about $100 including the original tuners, pick guard, controls and new gig bag.
So I’m in it for about $400 so far (including a NR pickguard) and just need to buy a few bits more (pots, knobs, tuners, strings) and then the finishing so about $800 all in when done, which is very close to the original goal.
