Yet Another Project - 1966 Fender Jazz Bass carcass ....

This project probably won't actually be done before the beginning of the next decade - but I just thought I'd post some of the early stages anyway. What I have are a semi-destroyed 1966 Fender Jazz bass neck and then a 1966 to 1968 Fender Jazz body, that came to me with a horrendous black paint job over an even more horrendous stripping job ...



PEOPLE - DO NOT USE THE THOMPSON ROTO-STRIPPER or CHISELS or PAINT-GNAWING RODENTS .. ON YOUR GUITARS !!!!!!


I have had the neck for who knows how long - an Ebay purchase for way too much money at the time - its a 1966 Jazz neck that someone cleverly removed the fretboard from ( I use cleverly a lot because there are SO many clever guitar work-persons out there ..). The truss rod - inlays and binding are gone too - but they did at least leave the very nicely aged original Olympic White headstock and decal intact - I LOVE that look and its what made me pay way too much for this neck.



The tricky part of this job is that the fretboard is a rosewood veneer type board, meaning it has a concave underside where it attaches to the neck. A difficult thing to make unless you have some kind of giant cutter to mill rosewood. I instead used a combination of scraping and sanding with a radiused block ( 7 1/2 in. radius) to slowly create my own veneer board. This was as far as I got, about 6 years ago, before putting the project aside for more urgent things, like rebuilding my house.

Recently, my friend Steve traded me a 60's Jazz Bass body for a 71 P-bass body. Steve originally acquired the Jazz body with a 68 neck and other 1968 hardware - so presumably this body was on an instrument that left the Fender factory in 1968. However, after stripping the body - it became obvious that it was identical to the body on my 1966 Jazz bass - in terms of routing, contours and placement of the two dowel pin marks on the centerline of the rear of the body. I'm not an expert on Jazz basses - maybe Fender used the same tooling from 1963 through 1968 on Jazz basses - whereas Precisions had some subtle changes around 1967 ("post-CBS").

Anyway - here are a few pics of the body largely stripped - there are a few dings that will be filled and about three areas on the front near the bridge that will require some lacquer filling. The rear scoop is the classic early and mid 60's DEEP scoop with a sharp edge - very nice! The body weighs 4 lbs 2 ozs - fairly lightweight - and notice the remnants of the original Olympic White finish on the insides of the cutaways.

Overall this will make a nice Jazz bass - sometime next decade ....





Krishna Jain