Dismantled

Right, so the Marlin has now been dismantled, everything except the electrics anyway:

One or two minor hiccups along the way - the neck was not only bolted on but had some glue as well, nothing that a little brute force didn't take care of though! A couple of the machine head screws were almost impossible to remove too, in the end one had to be simply levered out of the back of the headstock. Turns out also that the neck is not only curved, it's twisted slightly too - hopefully this photo shows that:

I've weighed a few of the bits for reference, and to help figure out whether there are any other ways to save weight. The neck doesn't seem unduly heavy at 850g (although I have nothing to compare it with) and although I plan to replace the bridge and machine heads I know I won't save a huge amount of weight there.

However, the body (with pickups and electrics still in place but no other hardware) weighs ~3.4kg out of the ~4.9kg total weight of the bass. Compare that to my Aria 5-string which weighs in at 4kg for the whole bass, and it's clear that the body is definitely where the maximum possible weight loss can happen :-)