Enter Sandman...

Lots of little jobs getting ticked off now. I made it to the shops and picked up some sandpaper, so I was able to sand down the white area's of the body. Once they were clean, I gave them another wipe of oil. All looked good, so I gave the damaged areas another blast of matte laquer, and hopefully that's the body more or less done.

I'd previously done most of the headstock reshape, and was expecting to fine tune it and sand it. However following the first pass of sanding it started looking great, so I gave it a final pass of fine sanding, and a wipe of oil. The sanded area was lighter than the rest (which is stained a light yellow), so I tried a few things to darken it down - coffee, cocoa, and finally curry powder!! It's not a perfect match, but it looks pretty good, so I can live with it.

The Jazz control plate arrived, so I was able to wire up the control plate. While you might think that I'd be able to use the existing wiring (as a Jazz has to Vol's and a tone, just like we need), it turned out that to get the correct layout, and make it fit the long control layout I had to more or less completly dismantle it, and rewire it.  No biggy, it all went together great, and the nice shiny control knobs really look the part. Sheehans basses use (from front to back) V/T/V layout with the tone only affecting the EB pickup. It's a slightly odd layout (with the T in the middle), but makes more sense when you see this old photo of the bass, when it had FOUR controls. Clearly Billy added the new pickup, and added a new set of V/T controls for it, but at some point the P tone control was removed - perhaps when the stereo output was added?

On interesting thing I learned - Jazz controls wire their volume pots so that the pickup goes to the wiper, while P's use them in the more obvious pickup connected to the end, and output to the wiper. J's need to be that way because they have to pickups, and P's use a more obvious layout, but I wonder if there's any difference in the sound?

Anyway - the body is now finished, so it can go into final assembly. The neck is oiled, so just needs laquered, logo'd and the tuners attached...

It's so close!!!1