I have always loved the look of the Fender Jazz Specials from the mid 80's that had the grey body with the black headstock. In fact, my initial thought for this bass was to fill the pickup routes and re-route for a P-J setup. I decided to borrow the color scheme and use more traditional pickups. I also decided to not use black hardware like the JS or Gibson Birds and chose to use chrome hardware as i thought it would look better with my paint scheme (again uwe, i am sorry). The body color I chose was Gun Metal Grey metallic and black metallic for the headstock. Having never painted a guitar before, i didn't know to be afraid of using a metallic paint. I don't really recommend it for a first-timer, but thanks to Joe it turned out much better than I hoped. I made some major mistakes and had to start over a few times (3 attempts in all I think) but finally got it painted and clear-coated. Despite all the reading that I did online I never heard anyone say NOT to use acrylic enamel for the clear coat. I was using Duplicolor paint from Autozone so i figured I should use Duplicolor's clear too. Only later did I find out that the acrylic enamel takes a really long time to harden
. Oh well, it was too late at that point unless i wanted to strip it and start over, which i was not going to be happy about. I had also taken the body from it hanging spot and laid it on my work table for a while because it had been curing for a couple of months, which resulted in a few dents in the clear (life got in the way a few times during this project) on the front and back. I was pretty angry with myself and convinced that the dents couldn't be fixed. Joe came by to check it out and worked some sanding magic on it and pronounced the finish "salvageable". Thank God!!! I hung it back up and let it cure a little longer. At some point I spent an evening watching the Walking Dead and wet-sanding the clearcoat until I achieved the shiny finish I was after. I then used a little swirl/scratch remover to help clean it up a bit. it turned out much better than I had a right to hope for and like I said, I am happy with it overall.
After starting the project I was able to aquire a pair of those Gibson 70's TBird pickup covers and rings so I decided to strip my black TB Plus to install inside the covers. That never happened but it sent me down the chrome path so I picked up an ABM style bridge, Gotoh tuners, and a stainless pickguard and truss rod cover just to really over accessorise the project
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At yet another turn in the road, I decided to get a couple of the TB Plus pickups that are guitar-humbucker sized to load inside the 70's covers. I bought two of those from Ebay because I remembered the pickups in my LP Standard bass being so aggressive and I really liked the sound of them. I also wanted this bass to sound different than my ebony Gibson so I felt like this was a good move. I decided that I didn't want to have a tone pot since I just turn them all the way up and leave them, but I did want a kill switch so I planned to install that switch in the tone knob position. I used silicon to install the pickups inside of the covers so that if I wasn't happy or ever wanted a change that it would be an easy job to remove them. It ended up wired in a Vol-Vol-Kill configuration.
I had to use a luthier along the way to install the bridge, set it up, install some wood pieces to raise the pickups to the proper height, and wire it up for me but other than that all of the work was done by myself or Joe. The pickups aren't wired the way I want right now so that will need to be redone. As it is now you can't turn off one volume knob without killing the output to both pickups. I want to be able to use just one pickup at a time when I want that sound so that will need to be addressed later. This bass sounds HUGE!!! The output is quite loud and it sounds like an angry bright Thunderbird. Just what I was after
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This is the abbreviated version of this long process, but now it is time for some pics of the completed project.
