This project is my latest attempt at the perfect 5-string bass. :-) Here are the specifications: The fingerboard will be Bolivian rosewood fingerboard with medium-jumbo frets and paua abalone 1/4" position markers The neck is a single piece of flamed hard maple with a double-action truss rod and steel stiffening rods The scale length is 35", nut width is 1-11/16", and the fingerboard has 22 frets The body is a three-layer sandwich: the front layer is a marvelous bookmatched crotch-figure claro-walnut top, the middle layer is 1/4" soft maple, and the back is 13/16" of straight-grain black walnut. The pickups will consist of dual-coil Musicman-style at the bridge and neck, both custom-wound by Kent Armstrong The bass will be equipped with a Bartolini NTBTG 2-band EQ preamp powered by a 9-volt battery The bass will have a cast-brass gold-plated deluxe bridge with strings attached through the body The tuning machines are deluxe gold-plated tuners from WD Music The bass will be equipped with gold-finished hardware.

Here are two pictures of the neck:

The front of the body: The claro walnut went very dark when I started putting the finish on--much darker than I expected. I'm using Minwax polyurethane on this one.

The back side of the body:

I made the decision after talking to Kent Armstrong to use a pair of dual-coil MusicMan style pickups, so I rerouted the neck pickup cavity thusly: I've also installed some of th hardware to the body.

More progress on the assembly of the bass. The pickups arrived from Kent Armstrong, and I've mounted the neck to the body. But I still need another tuner from WD Music. The plan was to install 4 tuners on the left side and one on the right, so that's what I ordered. But then I decided to put them all on the left, so I need to order another one from WD. As you can see, the inlay in the headstock is done as well.

March 8, 2006: The bass is nearly completed now. The fifth tuner finally arrived from WD Music today, so I installed that, then cut a bone nut and installed the strings. The next step was wiring: the volume controls (the two closest to the pickups) are also push-pull switches that switch the coils on each pickup from series to parallel. The bass also has a Bartolini 2-band EQ preamp--the other two controls are bass and treble. There's also a 9-volt battery in the control cavity to control the preamp.

This picture shows the headstock in more detail:

Some pictures of the bass in its case, ready to go to music practice: