c.1968 Fender Precision Bass (Refin)

This is a customer's instrument that was in for some work. It's a 1968 P-bass body that's been refinished in shoreline gold. The neck is off of a 70s? J-bass and shares the same headstock color. Of course, the pickguard is a replacement.

It's a way-cool bass with that super-slim vintage neck feel and it plays fast as all heck. My work included filling stripped neck-bolt holes and redrilling them, setup, and a bit of soldering on the ground connections inside.

This bass had some slight downpressure issues on the E&A strings (the headstock was angled too flat) which I remedied by lightly filing a trench on the shaft of the tuner at the bottom of the post. This grabs the string and keeps it at the bottom of the post to give better downpressure.

Cool clay dots. The frets are probably replacements. The rosewood board and slim J-bass neck feel great combined with the P-bass body and controls.

Bridge.

Because the neck is super-slim and has a very small twist, I stuck to lighter strings (100w to 40w) to keep off excess tension.

As usual, all the pots needed tightening and a few screws needed replacement. Note the one missing screw which no longer has any wood left to mount it!

Someone must have liked to pop the strap up at the headstock.

The gold finish looks pretty sharp!