Angel

Pickup holes sorted. I also used this as a template to mark the routes on the body. As the Precision pickup is under the pickguard I just routed it out freehand. I made a template for the Jazz pickup though. I actually made two, the first one wasn't good enough. The second one wasn't great, but good enough for me. And here's them both done. Hopefully to the correct depth! you can also see where I moved the bridge back on this one.

I spent ages checking and double checking bridge placement and here I am drilling the holes. After all that I wasn't happy with the placement so I filled these and re-drilled new ones! bl**dy amateur! This is the pickguard paper template stuck onto the plastic. Took a lot of faffing getting the shape how I wanted. And this is the basic cutout, done with jigsaw, files, sanding etc. I have now worked out and marked pickup placement.

I've been a bit lazy with updates, and I forget to take pix at times, but there has been progress ... Basic neck shaping: A bit of a jump as I forgot to take pix, but it's shaped, varnished and tuners added: Headstock - router split a bit off at the top early on! Oh well, I ain't a pro and I ain't that fussy!

Just a quick question - 4 & 5 string jazz basses , do they have the same size body dimensions?

Thanks for that! most helpful!

The only problem with all these is knowing if the bass will fit! The most useful photo would be a straight on shot of a standard bass (maybe jazz or precision) so you could judge by how that firs the space. Why does no-one take a pic like that??

I'm liking that! If my bass fits then that's what I'd go for for sure!

Anyone got a recommendation for a good bass gig bag - Something roughly 5 string jazz bass size? I'm not a fan of hard cases, and my instruments rarely leave home. I'd like to get a decent quality gig bag with some padding, not one of those flimsy things! Money as always is a bit tight so I'm not after something diamond encrusted that you can drive over in a Sherman tank. Any thoughts?

I was surprised many years ago when I bought a Sammy Hagar album and reading the notes found out that the bass player was .... Eddie van Halen! I seem to recall that Yngwie played bass on one of his own albums.

Music at school was rubbish (being polite there). The teacher was a grumpy unpleasant man, and for some reason he hated my pal so we all got treated badly. I really wanted to learn the Flute. They passed one around the class once and said 'blow into this'. The two people who got a note out of it got to learn flute. I felt robbed, my one chance was pathetically unfair.

Yup. I'm into Prog as my main thing, and never before have there been so many amazing bands out there! We had the giants back in the day, Yes, Genesis et al, but what we have now is a VAST amount of musicians playing prog-related material. My best find in recent years has been Peter Jones, an amazing blind multi-instrumentalist with a superb voice. He's played live with both Camel and Francis Dunnery's It Bites in the past year, learning all keyboard parts with no help from reading a score! His own albums, under the name of Tiger Moth Tales are superb.

Absolutely one of my fave people ever in music. His bass playing (and Stick) is immense, he produces incredible music with incredible artists, he does amazing quickfire sketches, he is Incredibly funny on social media videos - just a complete nutcase!

Which is an all time classic of course! Similar but different. Personally I think that Henrik and Aron play really well together, great understanding. Part of the fun is the way they play off each other in my opinion, which you can see in the video.

I really like Dirty Loops, and this is a nice little number from Henrik Linder and drummer Aron Mellergard, both superb musicians. I know that bass 'showboating' is most definitely not everyone's thing, but I am a big fan of Henrik (when he is in song mode rather than mad jazz noodling!). He is actually the person that got me inspired/back into bass after years in the doldrums. Not that I can play anything like him of course! Anyway, here's the video:

Last of the recent jobs, shaping the end of the fretboard. A bit chipped away which was a bit annoying. I may fix it up or I may just leave it. My instruments are always to just be played rather than be perfect so I'm not massively bothered.

Drilling holes for neck screws All done. A also clamped the neck in place so that it aligned properly and drilled some pilot holes to sort later.

Yay! all fitted and glued Carefully re-did the slots to depth having radiused the fretboard. That was lots of tedious sanding, forgot to take a pic!

Basic routing of the inlay holes and some fine tuning with the dremel

Nope. I'm making a single ply white one. As I've mentioned before, I don't think that the final look I am going for is going to be popular. I may not even post the final bass pic!

Planning out markers. I painted the fretboard white and drew around the markers. Current job is marking the edges with a chisel. Doing the cutouts is going to be ... tricky. I have a plan, untested so far ...

My simple set up for fret slotting All slots done

Holes drilled for J-retro And routing done. I had to make two templates for this, one for the cavity and one for the cover. The wood is pretty thin to allow the micro switches to pass through. Not ideal!

Neck pocket template sorted ... and routed. It will probably end up deeper but I don't want to remove too much wood before the neck is sorted.