I was kindly gifted a 1963 6 string Hofner 455 6 string guitar by Nev Claughton, Mr Music Nelson.
I chose to convert it to a Senator bass.
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| The 1963 Hofner 455. I told the donor that I did not want the hardware. |
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| The guitar was in reasonable condition considering its age, a few scratches and dings here and there. |
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| The bare patch on the back was where some damage had occurred. I repaired the binding where it had been knocked off. |
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| My binding repair. |
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| After assessing the neck and measuring it at the nut I found that the nut width was suitable as a bass nut width. I chose to remove the neck and extend it to a 30 inch bass scale and extend it with a scarf joint at the neck heel. |
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| This is the bass that I wanted a good replica of. |
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| The bass on the right is the model that I'm building there are a couple of key differences. My bass is 80mm deep in the body, the Senator was built with a 50mm body depth. The brochure shows the Selmer model released into the UK market. My headstock is closer to the 1963-64 release featuring an inlaid mother of toilet seat dagger inlay and a 3D Hofner logo. |
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| The beginning of the neck extension. |
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| I cut the existing heel off the neck and moved it down to the new location on the spliced neck extension. I drilled for a mahogany dowel into the heel to stabilise the graft. I overlaid a maple veneer on the head stock to cover the 6 plugged tuner holes. |
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| I fabricated a truss rod out of 5 mm high tensile steel threaded rod. i slipped a piece of shrink wrap over the thread. the black plastic headstock overlay is inlaid with the Hofner dagger motif. |
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| This is the Artist 185 Brokat bass that I chose as a donor for all the genuine 1963 parts that I wanted. |
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| My 1:1 scale drawing of the Hofner saddle. |
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| I fabricated the saddle from Kwila decking wood. the frets are left over from my fret job and the white stripes are remnants of the neck binding. |
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| The finger board is made from Purple heart. I cut the fret slots using the spacing from a Stew Mac, online calculator. 22 frets over a 30 inch scale length. |
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| Fretted and ready for the neck to be glued in. I bound the neck in white ABS. i used 3 mm faux tortoise shell knitting needles as side dot markers. They look suitably vintage. |
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| The masking tape lines helped me to align the neck. |
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| The Hofner logo was cast in resin from the donor bass. The tuning machines were also from the donor bass. because they were 4 inline I had to remove the spindles and rotate 2 of them to fit on the right hand side of the headstock. The nut is made from two laminations of bone and one of ebony. |
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| Here I'm fabricating the tail piece using piano wire, brass sheet and an old gibson string anchor. The assembly is hard soldered together. |
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| My 1:1 scale drawing of the tail piece. |
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| Test fitting, its too long, some minor adjustments to be made. |
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| Now for painting. the binding is masked with lining tape. |
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| The tape comes off. |
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| Another test fit. |
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| A truss rod cover is made and fitted. |
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| I blacked out the finger board with back stain. |
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| A set of D'Addario Chrome strings to see how it plays. |
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| A test fit od pickup ring and knobs. |
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| The Nova-sonic humbucker pickup came from the donor bass, it needed rewinding which was expertly achieved by Glyn Evans, Mr Glyn. |
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| Wow it sounds great! |
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| A new set of medium scale D'Addario chrome stings and it's ready to become my main playing bass, a compliment to my other self built Antoria guitar/bass conversion. |
