Starting back in 2006 or so, I’d been slowly rebuilding one of my 5-string Fender Jazz basses into an active fretless- and by 2008 had reached what I’d thought was a stopping point after damn near replacing or modifying everything on it that wasn’t made out of wood. However, I decided to leave the defretted-and-filled fingerboard uncoated as I’d been brushing up on my mad cello skillz simultaneously for some studio gigs, and decided to stick with bare wood for some consistency and see how it held up to my usual bass-abuse. However, after a brief month of attempting to use flatwounds to be kind to the wood, I relented and went back to my old standby Dean Markley DR2000 open-core (at the bridge) roundwounds, and within a few months could already see them starting to dig into the wood.

Ouch.  Can’t have that going on for long now, can we.

Now I’d tried the Jaco trick on an old J bass about 15 years ago – and used a boat epoxy to coat the fingerboard  - but never really warmed up to the final texture or alteration to the instrument’s tone.  Although the process was reportedly supposed to brighten the tone up a bit, I probably blew something in my hack job back then as it ultimately sounded a wee bit muddier (particularly in the low range) than it had been before the coating. So I was incredibly nervous now thinking about blowing my beautiful 5-string neck with a bad coat job again. SF Guitarworks to the rescue!

After talking a while with Benjamin (the SFGW shop manager) and finding that a) the process should – if done correctly – brighten things up a bit instead of the opposite, and b) there were a lot of options for the coating.

I decided to go with a cyanoacrylate coating, which is hard as shit, but absolutely beautiful sounding- most certainly a bit more defined and crisp. My fingers are mostly on string not wood, so the tactile difference was less pronounced, and the fact that I would overshoot slides about 1/16th step more than I would have normally makes me think that the added ‘slipperiness’ did change how it felt ever so slightly under my fingers. But the bonus was the almost mirror finish that it added to the bass.

You can check out the final bench photos of the neck on the SF Guitarworks blog here, although they barely do the finish justice in JPEG format. (Major props to Aaron for the work, and Benjamin for suffering my endless questions).  Seriously- I can’t recommend cyanoacrylate enough as a fingerboard coating – it turned out beautifully. I’ll post a video of it when I get back off the road and can unpack a bit.