Shortening the scale of an electric bass guitar

[Beate Ritzert]

Target instrument is an old Vester Witch fretless bass guitar, scale length 864mm. Target scale length. is 800 mm. There are nor fret lines, which makes the operation quite straightforward:

cut the fingerboard at the desired position and remove the surplus part.

glue the nut into its new position and regule the suplus part of the fingerboard. It must be thinned toward the old position of the nut in order to allow for some string angle at the nut, but not too much to maintain the necessary strength of the wood over the end of the trussrod. As can be seen, old rosewood can get bleached by the exposition to the light. Unfortunately i had protected the fingerboard with some PU laquer which of course got destroyed when i applied heat to the fingerboard. Which made it impossible to thin the wood on the gueling side.

the nut is narrower than the neck at the new position. This requires filling the sides of the neck with rosewood. in order to deal with the dark color of the freshly thinned fingerboard rest i made a fake trussrod cover from a piece of old maple and a fake nut in the old nut position.

Not shown: the cleanup of the finish were done with shellac, the side dots had to be removed and new side dots had to be drawn in the new positions (typical of many cheap fretless basses). Not the 1st time ... the original side dots were in the middle of the non-existing frets which ia a lot more irritiating than no side dots at all. So there were already old traces of former sidedots. The professional solution might have been adding a binding?

[Karl Wicklund]

Are there any implications having that much string length beyond the nut?

[Bob Francis]

I like the look of the fake nut solution.

[Jarno Verhoeven]

Pretty nifty!