So here was the critical aspect of this build.
With the neck, bridge, and pickups in place, I could string the Low B and G strings and see what I had for neck/body alignment. If the distance between the string and edge of the neck was too close or too far, or the strings didn’t line up with the pole pieces on the pick up, well then all I had was a pile of nice bass parts. I was surprised how close it was without having made any adjustments yet. I already had the wrench in the bridge expecting to do major work here. Almost spot on.
The Obsidian Wire control board was excellent quality, and fitted the nickel plated control panel seamlessly.
I went with this unit because it is preassembled and has a solderless terminal for installing the pickups. This makes swapping pickups easy if I decide to try something else.
I did a test fit for the control cover and pick guard.
The pickguard was Warmoth, the control cover was not, so they didn’t line up.
To control cover I bought was longer so required cutting back on the pickguard.
Here’s the completed bass. I had purchased a massive bar type string tree but it looked too modern for the vintage vibe I’m shooting for with this bass, so I went with two round style.
Here’s a bad pic of the finished bass. I’ll post better soon.
The bass plays great. I sent it to luthier Mark Anquist to clean it up and just got it back.
He strobe tuned it, dressed the frets, cleaned up the pick guard/cover plate seam, adjusted the nut, put a spacer under the E/A string tree, re-set pickup height, installed strap buttons, installed Hipshot nickel plated string ferrules (the body was pre-drilled for this per my request, but the ferrule holes were too small for the Hipshots), and installed Thomastik-Infeld flatwounds.
I will post a sound clip as soon as I can, but I don’t have any recording gear. Any quick and easy apps to use to get this done?
