New guy on the forum

[blazer]

Hey there, I'm Wouter Jaegers. A new guy in town and I am renagade luthier making guitars and Basses on a professional basis.

The story behind the ricky copy I made is amusing. I had bought a ridiculously cheap Hondo Copy of a Rick (Identical to one that Peter Hook played in Joy Devision. I played a couple of shows with it but it sounded REALLY bad.

So then my bandmates were teasing me of buying such a ****** sounding bass, so I went "Wanna make a wager that I can can turn this piece of **** into a proper sounding bass?"

So I took the hondo to the workshop and took it apart, the plywood body would serve as a template to make a routing template in order to make a new body. I made the body out of three pieces of very tightly flamed maple (the picture doesn't do the beauty of this bass justice) with two very dark pieces of lacewood as contrasting stripes, allas when shaping the body I discovered too late that the template was slightly off centre.

I then decided that I would not use the original pickups and instead opted for two Kent Armstrong J-bass pickups, they do the "Clank" with a vengeance. The Original Bridge was ditched in favor for a heavy duty ABM bridge and I put on Grover tuners to replace those crummy tuners with which it came.

I hope you guys like this one-off re-think of a 4001 I made.

http://alembic.com/club/messages/402/7088.jpg

[johnnyb]

Wouter, I think your bass looks great, at least its the right shape for a bass. I too dabble in the black arts (I have built a few guitars and basses)...but you really should just get a Rick...remember "once you've had rick..it's the only pick"....(I just made that up!)

[delberthot]

like - "4003, that's the one for me" or "Rickenbacker, that's the only one I'll pack(er) and lets not forget "Use the force at the Rick Resource" man I'm on a roll

[bobcat]

Very impressive. How does it sound?