Brown bass

Mylkinut · April 26

Last year I built this bass out of a MIM body and a '79 neck, and it was very nice. Too nice. It actually went together with such little stress that I didn't really bond with it. Plus, the blue wasn't really working for me.

I'd been itching to pull it apart and try a different body with the neck, but this time I was going to pick something rough so the project lasted more than a couple of hours.

I then found this body on eBay. I liked the fact that it was a single piece of mahogany, wasn't too heavy, and had a nice grain.

It also looked to be in rough shape and had a pretty substantial flaw in the form of body filler making up a significant part of the neck heel. Plus it was only £75 - perfect.

Once I received it I wasn't sure what to think. The routing wasn't great in areas, and the body filler looked way worse in person than online - let's just say £75 didn't feel that cheap anymore. Still, I decided to persevere because I'm all about type 2 fun.

Looking closely at the grain, it looked to be filled with... something. I assumed it was a mix of paint and paint stripper after someone abandoned an attempt to strip it, so I opted to start off with applying more paint stripper to see what happened. I didn't take any pictures of this bit, but what it did was remove the left over stripper packed into the grain, revealing lots of black paint still sitting in the grooves below. My guess is this body was originally intended to be a natural finish, but was damaged during routing so repairing with filler and painting the body was the only way to salvage it. Someone later down the line then decided to strip the body, saw the body filler and must have jumped ship on the project.

So, what to do? Given the paint looked so comfortably embedded in the grain, I decided the only way forward was to start sanding...

...and look at what was sitting underneath! Lovely, fresh mahogany. At this point I started to get optimistic that this might actually be worth doing. I started sanding with 150 grit, then moved to 180 grit, then decided that was enough (it was not). I also decided at this point that things were going so well that hiding the body filler would be easy (it was not).

Once I decided I was done with sanding, I started thinking about how this bass should look. I felt it would be nice to honour the '79 neck and go for a 70s look, so the body had to be appropriately brown. I also wanted it to smell good, so danish oil was the obvious choice.

Here's how the body looked after a couple of coats of oil. It looks alright in this picture, but what I couldn't get a decent shot of was a weird shimmering effect I kept noticing whenever light moved across the body. It would go away if I brushed the surface in one direction, but came back if I rubbed it the other way. I eventually worked out that I'd torn out some of the softer grain during sanding, causing a small amount of fuzz which, once oiled, made the body look like brown velvet. Very 70s, but not the right kind of 70s. My wife suggested lightly brushing the surface with a high grit sandpaper to take the fuzz off. I'm glad I married her because this worked like a charm - I chose 600 grit and sanded as gently as I could. This sorted the issue completely, so I went on to add another few coats of oil (5 in total).

Here's what it looked like once done. I stopped at this point because I didn't want the body to be too shiny - this felt like a nice balance between an intentional finish and natural wood. The few bits of black paint still stuck in the grain gave it a nice patina too.

Now came the issue of how to hide the body filler around the heel. At this point, the total seconds of thought I'd applied to figuring this out was still in single digits, and in hindsight I probably should have added to that total before starting work on it.

I had vague notions of painting the filler to match the wood grain, but Googling this made it look very hard to get right. However, poking around on Amazon revealed a technology that was new to me: furniture touch up pens. These are basically felt tip pens in various shades of brown, designed to hide small marks on wooden furniture. I decided this large piece of body filler was nothing more than a small mark, so I bought some.

Before I started with the pens, I used some 80 grit sandpaper to score the filler and give it some 'grain'. I then used pens in various combinations of 'oak', 'maple', 'mahogany', and 'walnut' to try and get somewhere close to the oiled mahogany.

This is how it came out. It's not that close, but it's better than the white filler that was there before. Am I happy with it? Not really, but I coloured in a bass with felt tips like a toddler so I'm not sure I should be happy with it. It would be somewhat easy to reverse with nail polish remover, so if I suddenly get an idea that's actually good I can always try again.

Now came the time to put this brown boy together, but as I offered various parts up to the body it became obvious I was going to have to drill a lot of new holes.

First up was the bridge. I opted for a 1980s Schaller 3D largely because I already had it in my parts drawer, but I also love how these bridges look and function. What I don't love is the fact they don't use a Fender screw pattern (though I'm pretty sure they totally could with some tweaks), so some drilling followed.

Next up was the scratchplate - this had been on a few Fenders in its life so I knew it was correct, but not one hole lined up. Much drilling followed.

I then lifted the pickups and wiring out of the original blue body I had (why did I take that bass apart again?), and got it all into this one. This took some sanding in the cavity to get everything to sit flush, but more annoyingly the pickup screwholes were misaligned. Yet more drilling followed.

I then went to fit the strap buttons, and noticed the lower one was about an inch off of centre. My drill was out of battery by now, so I just put the strap button in the hole that was already there. I guess it's extra character or something, but it does look a bit odd.

The final touch was a thumb rest in the late-70s position. I already had a standard black one ready to go, but then out of nowhere a random eBay scroll revealed something I'd been hunting for for years (genuinely - years and years): the brass thumb rest from a 1980s P Bass Special. It was also priced very reasonably, so after losing my mind to the point of dropping my phone, I bought it.

And bugger me is it heavy.

So now I had a choice of thumb rests. Should I go for the subtle, light weight, sensible option? Or should I add needless extra weight in the form of a piece of bling that doesn't even match a single piece of fitted hardware?

Obviously I went for the stupid option; It looks like a gold tooth, and goes well with the felt tip finish.

After a quick set up, I'm calling this one done. I really like how this bass came out, and it was enough of a ballache that I actually feel attached to it now. Here it is with my '86 MIJ and '77, looking cool 😎