Bridge position repair

[fatmarris]

Well some of you may have seen my short scale build so far it’s been really fun but after all that work I was having intonation issues so back to the drawing board.. I tried a few small things before deciding to pull it back apart but the reality is the right way is the only way..

So this thread is a document of my repairs

I may mess it up who knows!

Here it goes!

This the bass! The problem is the E it too close to the neck to get tuned right..

I’ll start with more information tonight..

 

[fatmarris]

So I started by setting intonation on the G and then marking that with some tape on the side of the bass then I extended the G saddle to the farthest point then matched the intonation tape mark and put a pilot hole on my center hole so I can come back to it..
I decided I would plug all my holes and redrill them but I wanted it to look clean so I decided I would use face grain plugs.. but my previous drillings were all over an inch deep and I’m not interested in leaving deep holes in the body.. so I decided I would put dowels in but I wanted to match the wood and I didn’t want to drill a larger hole than I needed to

So I made my own dowels and installed them then next steps in a couple days

 

[Beej]

This may be too late, but one way to retain the old holes on the back of the bass (and hence not having to drill new ones) would be to relocate the holes on the front of the bass, and then using a home-built alignment jig, drill angled holes from the new top holes so they exit out the existing bottom holes.

 

[fatmarris]

This may be too late, but one way to retain the old holes on the back of the bass (and hence not having to drill new ones) would be to relocate the holes on the front of the bass, and then using a home-built alignment jig, drill angled holes from the new top holes so they exit out the existing bottom holes.

I thought about that, but I was concerned about the angle over the bridge. I wouldn’t have bothered with it if I was moving bridge closer to the neck, but I felt like moving it away from the neck would make the angle too weird and hard on the strings..
it is a little ugly at the moment with the end grain of the dowels, but hopefully with the face grain plugs, which I’ll be doing the next couple days you won’t notice it