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Title is self-explanatory. For me, it would have to be a Grand Prix P-Bass that the customer wanted "to come out as good or better than the Fender Custom Shop." This is one of about 30 instruments I did for him, one of which was almost an identical job to this one.
He got it at a pawn shop. Lefty, black finish, some weird custom painted pickguard that was bubbling up and cracking all over and had not been done well in the first place, crappy bridge, crappy neck, the works.
What he wanted:
1) New bridge installation
2) New neck installation, new tuner installation, nitro finish sprayed on the back and headstock, hand cut bone nut
3) Strip the body and refinish in stark white nitro -- no clearcoat so it won't yellow over time.
4) Install Lace Sensor P-Bass Pickups
5) Rout for a Lace Sensor Stingray pickup in the bridge position
6) Custom wiring
7) Setup with lowest possible action, level + recrown + polish frets
**8) Keep the original pickguard. This was not possible with the new neck and the new pickups, which the original pickguard didn't even remotely fit. And this is the craziest part: I ended up designing and cutting a new pickguard completely by hand to perfectly fit the neck and the pickups, then redesigning the artwork and painting it to be an improved, professional version of the original.
I hand made some routing templates for the P-Bass pickups and the Stingray pickup, and further took it upon myself to airbrush it not only as close to the original as possible, but to improve the artistic design.
To get the pickguard to fit the new neck, I used epoxy wood putty and wax paper. I put the wax paper over the end of the neck before mounting it on the body, then stuck the plywood pickguard template I'd made against it -- with epoxy putty smushed between the template and the end of the neck. The epoxy wood putty hardened on the plywood template, I carefully removed it, then made a *new* template with a neck pocket cutout that fit the new neck perfectly.
Once the shape was done, I hand-cut several stencils out of mylar film using an Xacto knife, protractor, straightedge and French curves. I carefully observed the original pattern, drew it out, then improved upon it and added a couple of my own touches to the pattern to make it more aesthetically pleasing.
Then I airbrushed nitrocellulose over the stencils to color the pickguard. I started by scuffing the pickguard with a scotch brite pad, then put down the base coat of green lacquer, before adding the stencils to airbrush black nitro over the green base nitro.
I mixed the colors myself using Colortone pigments and Colortone dyes in careful ratios. After everything was done, I cleared over it.
The actual process was extremely difficult, and at first I had lacquer drips I had to clean up. I ended up using very dry coats and also using Frog Tape after the stencils to make sure the lines were as crisp as possible. It was quite a process to get everything immaculate, but this guy was the biggest stickler for perfection I've ever met in my career.
This was 5 years ago. I did the last one for him a year ago. It was similar to this job. I'll share a quick before and after pic of that one in my next post.
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