7 string, medium scale bass in the design process.

[Micah Covington]

http://i1236.photobucket.com/albums/ff4 ... B8105F.jpg

[Micah Covington]

Filled in around the pickup with wall filler, saw dust and brown ink. When it dries I'll make it look pretty. The body is dry in this pic. It's coated with two part epoxy resin applied straight onto the wood. It really made the figure pop, but it's a pain to buff out. It's naturally shiny but it absorbs into different grain at different rates. After the first coat some places where bone dry and others had a film of epoxy on the surface. The wood had some soft spots on the back where it's spalted, the epoxy helped strengthen these right up. It also filled knot holes and pores where they needed to be filled. I need to find a way to buff the surface flat without dulling the epoxy. I'm thinking I will have to use micro mesh for this.

[Micah Covington]

Here you can see the messed up area around the pickups. I will make it pretty before im done.

[Jason Rodgers]

Woa, your earlier picture made the wandering pickup cavity cuts look a lot smaller than the filler repair attempt. Did more of the edge break away? An easy way to hide that could have been pickup bezels wide enough to cover the gap.

[Micah Covington]

Yeah, more of it broke. I came up with a pickup surround made from some plexiglass I had on hand.

[Mark Wybierala]

I've been into making short scale basses for quite some time. A short scale B-String is really pushing things but I have found that if you modify the string at the saddle break point you can get better results.

What I have done on short scale E-Strings is to make my own tapered wound string. Its a bit tedious but it comes down to removing some of the winding starting at the ball and decreasing the diameter where the break angle occurs. I have found bass strings with two or three layers of windings. I'm shooting from the hip when I do this. There is probably someone who knows a scientific method for determining the best measurements. I remove the outer winding to about one inch forward of the break point and remove the next winding to half of that. I then take nylon thread and secure the loose winding by wrapping the thread as you would when fly tying. I only use enough thread to secure the windings and the thread does not continue to the break point. I apply thin CA to the thread to give it some durability. Doing this cures some of the intonation problems and the compromised tonal response of short scales. You might try this if you have a problem.

[Beate Ritzert]

Mark, while this sounds interesting and absolutely plausible, it has the obvious disadvantage that the player needs to do this for every change of strings. So - which alternatives are there? 2 part bridge with very small string angle? How small? What about the neck?