This project will begin shortly. It's a fretless Jazz-style bass patterned after the legendary fretless bass played by the equally legendary Jaco Pastorius. The general specifications are: The fingerboard will be Bolivian rosewood fingerboard with maple inlaid fretlines and white mother-of-pearl position markers The neck will be constructed from three pieces of quarter-sawn hard maple with a double-action truss rod and graphite stiffening rods The scale length will be 34" and the nut width will be 1-7/16" The body will be alder with a three-color sunburst finish The pickups will consist of a Bartolini 9CPJD Jazz-style set, with passive electronics The bass will have a cast-brass vintage style bridge with strings attached through the body The bass will be equipped with chrome-plated hardware.

Here are the first pictures of this project in progress. In these pictures, the neck blank is being glued together. The center stripe is a 3/4" wide piece of quartersawn wood, and it is flanked on either side by two more pieces of quarrtersawn wood. All hard rock maple, of course (acer saccharum, AKA sugar maple). The blank is starting out at 1 inch thick.

This next picture shows the end grain of the three pieces I used. Larry lives in Hawaii, and he has experienced problems with the stability of single-piece necks on his basses in the past. The use of three pieces of quarter-sawn maple, coupled with graphite stiffening rods and a good-quality double-action truss rod, will lessen the impact of the high humidity in the Hawaiian Islands environment.

Another shot of the blank in the clamps:

The body for this bass arrived yesterday. Here's a picture that shows the color & grain really well:

January 25, 2006: This is the neck, after the truss rod and graphit stiffening bars were installed, and the fingerboard glued on. Then the neck was cut to rough shape. I've also done some sanding on the headstock area and the sides of the neck to get them straight. You can see pencil lines on the headstock in the picture below--the headstock still needs final shaping:

The back of the headstock:

Two pictures of the neck: