Here's a long overdue follow-up on a post from a few years ago.

I started off with an early 70s poplar Fender Musicmaster Bass body that had been mercilessly routed for different pickups and then apparently broken in half and badly reglued together.  The body was a cheap ebay purchase - I think I paid $15 for it plus shipping.

The initial stages of rebuilding and refinishing the body are covered in this post.

I eventually tracked down a 1971 Musicmaster neck that had been defretted and a set of the fairly unique early Musicmaster Bass tuners.

Musicmaster & Mustang Colors

As is often the case - the large body plugs I had glued in when I repaired the body were showing their seam marks, so I ended up sanding the front and back faces of the body flat again and spraying a few more coats of Daphne Blue.

I decided NOT to do a clear coat over the color coat, in keeping with the style of original Musicmaster Bass finishes - though I will point out that Daphne Blue is not a "correct" color for Musicmaster (or Mustang) basses or guitars.

This family of instruments had their own formulations of blue and red - with the blue being a slightly darker and greyer variation on Daphne Blue and the red being a slightly darker version of Dakota Red.  I believe that at least from 1970 on, these were fairly thin polyurethane finishes as opposed to acrylic and nitro lacquer finishes - so it may be that the red and blue were "offset" colors formulated in a different base.  These colors also did not have clear coats applied over them, so they do age slightly differently than typical Fender finishes - with more darkening and less yellowing.

I'm not sure what was used to finish 1965 through 1970 Mustangs and Musicmasters - but my 1966 Mustang Bass does not appear to have a topcoat on it and the color is a bit different from Dakota Red.  If anybody has some details on this, please let me know or post a comment !

Putting It All Together

The neck was a straight-forward refret, using Fender's current "medium" guitar fretwire as opposed to the "jumbo" fretwire used on Fender's full-size basses from 1966 on.

I made the pickguard using an old hacked up Musicmaster Bass pickguard  as a pattern, though I later realized I could have bought one from WD Music Products pretty cheaply.  Those are Strat knobs on the controls in this picture - I replaced them with the proper Jazz Bass style knobs.

The bridge is a recent Bronco Bass bridge, as is the pickup - with rest of the parts (neckplate, knobs, strap-buttons) being standard reissue hardware.  The pickup is a bit different from the original pickup in that it has a bar magnet across the bottom of the pole-pieces (as is typical of many Fender Squier pickups) as opposed to just having magnetic polepieces.  I may swap out the pickup for a reissue vintage Strat or Mustang pickup eventually, as these are much closer to the Mustang/Musicmaster guitar pickups that were used in original Musicmaster basses (yes - there are 6 polepieces under the plastic cover for ALL those Musicmaster basses!).


The bass has round-wound strings on it, but those may also be switched to flatwounds - as I find that combination to sound particularly good on Musicmaster basses!

I do greatly prefer the slimmer 1976 and earlier Musicmaster Bass necks to the much chunkier 1977 to 1982 necks. The more recent Squier Musicmaster and Bronco necks are also of the later chunky shape unfortunately.

And here it is - complete !!

All in all - a good playing lightweight little bass !! read more →

Usually the first step in the refinish process is removing the existing finish on the guitar. In some cases this is very easy, requiring just some sanding with a random orbital sander and a block - and other times a standard chemical stripper, such as ZipStrip, will work to cleanly bubble the finish off.

However, there are also a whole breed of indestructible finishes - starting with Fender's polyester finishes of the 70s and 80s - and including a whole variety of other recent instruments. These finishes have the advantage of being very chip resistant and pretty much wear free - for example, the back of the neck on my 1970 P-bass is still shiny shiny - while the body, which was finished in lacquer - is missing about 1/2 the paint from age and wear. The problem with these super tough finishes arises when you want to remove them.

In the past, I have worked on a number of 70s Fender - and in those cases, I simply sanded/ground-off the polyester finish, usually leaving a good portion of the clear sealer coat underneath, since it was equally tough.

Recently, I was asked by a customer to strip an 80's "shred" neck - and then apply a thin satin finish on the wood, to improve the feel of the neck. The neck had a VERY shiny black finish - with binding - which I carefully masked off.




I first tried a standard Methyl Chloride-based paint stripper - this is Ace Hardware's version of zipstrip or 5F5 - all pretty similar. Unfortunately, after letting the stripper sit for about 40 minutes, the gloss was barely even dulled by the stripper - and the finish was certainly not going to be coming off anytime soon.

I then decided to search for what I heard referred to as "Aircraft Stripper" - which was supposedly made for the purpose of stripping paint off of aluminum skinned aircraft (e.g. when USAirways took over Piedmont Airways and repainted all their planes). After a little calling around, I found the product pictured below at AutoZone - $13 for a quart container.



I applied it to the neck - left the basement for 20 minutes - and when I came back - I was able to scrape off a bit of the finish (with a plastic scraper) - finally something that at least softened the finish!

After another application - I was able to remove the entire color coat with the scraper and some steel wool - but this revealed a clear coat under the black paint.

I started again - with a heavy coat of the aircraft stripper - and let it sit for 40 minutes. This did soften up the finish - but I had actually still use metal scraper - CAREFULLY - to get the finish off . I didn't scrape the neck completely bare this way, as I didnt want to damage the maple neck, but what was left was sandable and loosened up anyway.

I am impressed with the capability of the aircraft stripper - I guess the ultimate test will be on a 1979 Fender body - if it can strip that, it can strip ANYTHING !!

A final note - WEAR GLOVES WHEN YOU USE THIS STUFF !! - it will start to burn your fingers within a few seconds of you getting it on bare skin - and it really hurts if you get some on more tender skin, like say the insider of your forearms !! Hear me now and believe me later .... read more →