See the business listing for this bass builder here
The feature bass this week proves that if at first you don’t succeed, try again. This builder did and the second time was a charm.
Bass builder Roger Blake writes:
I call this instrument The V2 Bass because it is the second version. The neck of the first version warped and was unceremoniously discarded. A new neck was then made and the entire instrument was refinished and reassembled.
The neck is constructed of three pieces of 1″ flat sawn hard maple glued face to face. This provided a block of maple with the grain perpendicular to the fretboard surface. The neck is reinforced with a two way adjustable and removable truss rod. There are two 1/8″ x 3/8″ carbon fiber neck rods on either side truss rod running the full length of the neck. The peg head is carbon fiber reinforced and capped with maple. The nut is made of bone. The fretboard is bird’s eye maple, 34″ scale, 21 frets, 10″ radius, and 1 1/2″ wide at the nut. The tuners are Gotoh compact bass tuners, 20:1 ratio.
The peg head inlays are silver, brass, and mother of pearl. The fretboard has black mother of pearl position makers with black side dots and is fretted with Dunlop 6105 fret wire.
The body is constructed of two pieces of alder and is capped with a figured mahogany veneer. The body is solid and is not chambered. The neck is attached to the body with four 10-24 allen flathead screws, neck mounting ferrules, and brass threaded inserts. The bridge is a Hipshot style A brass bridge .750” string spacing.
The electronics are passive. The pickups are Delano SBC4 HE/S-E 4 string M3 (EMG 35) size dual coil. The four position selector switch is wired as follows: #1 neck only, #2 neck and bridge in parallel, #3 neck and bridge in series in phase, #4 bridge only.
The signal from the pickups goes to the selector switch and then to a master volume control, a passive midrange control, and a passive tone control. This circuit is based upon the early 70’s Gibson Ripper Bass.
The instrument is finished with medium red mahogany stain, black and clear gloss nitrocellulose lacquer.
Well done!
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Nice work! Total eye candy too! The highly figured Birdseye Maple fingerboard is beautiful & reminds me of my extremely rare (1of24 made) Conklin GTRP4 Rocco Prestia signature bass. I’ll bet that wrk of art of yours has a nice fat & punchy sound. The neck will be a lot more stable than the 1st one, from what I’ve read. Very impressive! Keep up the good work, fellow thumper!
Beautiful bass – I really like your choice of pickup placement – Kudos.
Nice work Roger! I REMEMBER all the time you put into making it & the pictures turned out great!!