(Part 7) Basses for Newbies Bass 1-3

Bugger!!! I cracked one of the inserts on #1 with about 1/16th inch more to go before it was seated. Had to drill and then grind it out.

I damaged the hole when extracting the cracked insert, so i widened the hole to 1/4" and used a larger steel insert from McFeely's.

Better work on the neck joints when I'm a bit more focused. I thought since the others were easy, I'd just knock this out real quick before doing some other things around the house.

Anyways, the other inserts went in just fine. . . I was needing to set the saddles way too low on this bass, so I had to get a bit creative with the neck shim.

This didn't give me enough clearance, so I ended up using 2 pieces of business card in the back of this neck pocket. Typically, I'd have returned the bass if this was the case, but since there are no more of these, you do what you have to do.

Here's #1 with the neck fitted with threaded insert and set. . . the bass is stripped and I'm setting up to level the frets.

This one has a hump at the 5-6 fret and one at the last 2 frets. There was not way to get the neck completely straight, so I had to compensate on the fret level to get a good playing surface. The leveling went faster than I had anticipated (I believe from setup to fret polishing took ~2 hours), and #1 will hopefully be done soon. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now.

The nut popped out when I was leveling frets. I put 2 drops of super glue in, clamped it up, and here we are 'til next time: