This project had three goals: Replace the crappy pot metal bridge on my bass with a really neat hand-made steel one; do a fun machine shop project; and tell the story photographically.
It was quite an enjoyable journey, and I found it just as challenging to tell the story as it was to perform the machining steps.
Here is the full photo gallery. Smugmug only shows a portion of each caption, so click one of the photos and then hover over bottom edge of each shot to see the captions describing what is going on (yes it’s annoying, and I wish I could figure how to get the captions to stay on.)
So this is a Carvin bass–they are known for making custom guitars that aren’t crazy pricy. These days they are Kiesel Custom Guitars.
So you pick whatever you want from various menus and they build it for you.
Mine was custom made (and painted) for some random bassist in the 1980s and I found it in my local shop for about $400 a few years back. It had all chrome hardware on it which I quickly replaced with black.
Now, I’m changing out that black hardware for my own hand-made blued steel parts.
This is a bit of a tricky feat on a fretless bass, but not as bad as it would seem to be–even un-lined fretless basses like mine have side dots. You compare the octave harmonic at the double dot with the “fretted” note at the same position and adjust the screw accordingly. If the fretted note was sharp, then that means that the length of string over the pickup needs to be longer so you give that little bolt a few clockwise turns to ease the saddle away further from the neck.
The only real finesse comes with making sure you are playing the note cleanly on the double dot in the same way you would in performance, as there are no crisp frets to define where notes are.
The little brass-tipped set screws are for action height–typically set as low as possible without buzzing on a fretless bass.
I was a machinist in my early 20s, but found myself out of work and competing for jobs with loads of guys in their 50s who had huge amounts of experience and were lining up for any job–it was the end of the 80s and the industry was shrinking.
I never forgot the joy I always had of making things out of metal, and even though I love my work as a software engineer, I always dreamed of what it would be like to machine metal again.
Then when I hit 50 I decided to stop dreaming and start doing.
I had considered making a “Ask the home shop machinist” thread but was afraid it would simply drop to the bottom of the page with a thud, so I never got around to it.
To answer the question of cost: the mill and lathe were between 1 and 2K each. There are far cheaper options, but these were the cheapest I wanted to go since they had features I wanted (example: the lathe has a power cross feed, a rarity in home lathes). I was limited by weight (basement stairs) so unfortunately no second-hand industrial machines for me.
Of course, any machinist will tell you that tooling and accessories cost more than the machines themselves, and that is true. I probably have 10 or 15K in my shop–adding a DRO to a machine can cost 1K by itself–but that is cheaper than buying a boat, and I have more fun in my shop than I would on a boat.
As far as learning, this is an excellent time to start hobbies since there are so many good YouTube folks teaching all of the tips and tricks that one would only have learned on the job in decades past.
In this pair of (hour long) videos, the old master fixes a completely busted mandolin headstock–totally decapitated. He does an amazing job, and I highly recommend watching at least the first 10 minutes of video 1 and the last 10 minutes of video 2, if not the entire videos.
I love watching tradespeople work their craft, even if I have no clue how to do the things they do. I watch Mr. Carlson’s Lab to see him repairing old radios from the 30s, talking through the rat’s nest of wiring and fancy old-school tubes. I watch people like Rosa String Works doing amazing things with guitars and such. I live to watch NileRed explaining all kinds of chemistry that I’ll never understand. A few weeks ago I was watching a woman knitting socks, with careful precision in getting the heel and toe right and reinforcing the right bits.
As I watch those talented individuals it occurs to me that for them, making precision parts in a machine shop is probably just as much a mysterious skill as, say, troubleshooting old electronics is to me–they have simply spent their years studying a different craft.
I really enjoy seeing people who take pride in their work, no matter what it is.
Unfortunately, I failed to follow any proper testing protocol with this–I changed too many things at once.
It does indeed have a better sound and better sustain, but…
…I changed unknown flats for Rotosound 77s
…I am now using the through-body holes instead of the end holes
…And of course, the old pot metal bridge was replaced with steel
Any one of those would have improved the sound, but I imagine it’s the last two that really helped the sustain.
The almost nonexistent “mwah” hasn’t improved, but I think that’s more a result of using flats instead of rounds. Besides, I have a Fender Tony Franklin signature fretless that has stunning “mwah”. Horses for courses.
And yes, the black is where it’s at IMHO. These days it’s my favorite axe, even next to the Tony Franklin. It’s lightweight and the strings are a breeze to play on, like running in a meadow barefoot.
