This instrument came to me in a terrible state of disrepair with rusting, even missing hardware and carving into the body as pictured, which had to be filled in then sanded and primed and repainted in this beautiful orange metallic color.
The headstock had also been disfigured with the original decal being on black it could not be seen very well anyway plus the previous owner had tried to also carve their name into the headstock as well (like they had done on the body). So to remedy that I decided to do the headstock in matching metallic orange and add my Rescue bass decal and put in a Funky Junk logo on there as well for good measure.
The pickups were in good health so I retained them however to match the fretboard I gave the pickup the casing a a veneer of rosewood which looks quite nice, and I wired them to a two band EQ which I get from my Japanese supplier. I decided to keep the circuit quite simple with just a two band EQ balancer and volume there is no passive mode however if somebody wanted to install a push pull switch there might just be enough room in the cavity to do so.
The hardware is all very good quality; for the bridge we have a shcaller 3D which is one of my personal favorites, and for the tuners we have an assortment of reverse wind tuning pegs from gotoh, the G and D are the original regular Gotoh reverse wind vintage type tuning pegs whereas the A string has a resolite reverse wind tuning peg and the E string has a Hipshot drop d tuner reverse wind type installed.
The setup is extremely smooth and low, it plays like a breeze and sounds absolutely fantastic, I would put it up there with something like a blade or a moon in terms of sound and playability and also looks.
I decided to give the final finish a light relic touch because the body still had some visible indentations in it as did the headstock and I thought it would look a bit strange if I just left it all nice and shiny and new looking. So, I deliberately reinstated some of those original pits and dings just to give it a little bit of aging effect I think it works well.
The name "Masato" which was originally engraved into the body is still visible under certain angles of lighting, however, on first glance you wouldn't notice it. Despite that the finish is smoothed the touch and that is no unevenness where the engraving of the name was anymore having been filled in.
I feel like this is well worth the money I'm asking for giving the work that I put into it and also the high quality hardware that I've used plus there's also the added bonus of the the removable thumb ramp. It plays and sounds like a high quality jazz bass but comes about half the price that you would pay for one usually so I think it's well worth it.
Body. Alder
Neck. Rosewood on maple
Grip. Thin c
Nut. Bone 38mm
Scale. 34"
Pickups. JJ 60s spacing
Preamp. 2 band
Controls. Bal, vol, treb, bass
Tuners. Gotoh reverse type + hipshot BT3 reverse
Bridge. Shcaller 3D
Weight. 4.1kg
Case. Gig bag
