Project #1 - Marlin Sidewinder

My first project, the one that's inspired me to take up luthiery, will be to renovate my old Marlin Sidewinder bass. It was my first bass, which I was given when I was about 14 - soon to be superseded by my Aria Pro II 5-string a couple of years later. The Marlin was then lent to a neighbour and promptly forgotten about, only to be returned by the neighbour out of the blue last year. Unfortunately it is - and frankly always was - pretty much a piece of crap, so it needs a fair bit of work to get it playable!

The main problem with it is the neck, which is warped enough to make the action terrible, and adjusting the truss rod makes no difference to the curvature of it. In fact, there's even a small crack in the fretboard by the nut, right above the truss rod. So, a new neck will be needed!

The second problem is that it's very heavy, making it uncomfortable to play. My plan to reduce the weight (at least a little) is to strip/sand all the lacquer and paint from the body, carve/cut/trim down the body a bit to reduce the sheer volume of wood, then re-paint it before attaching the new neck. As yet I'm not 100% sure exactly what I'm going to do design-wise with the body - but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it so more on that later. I doubt it'll be anything particularly adventurous for my first project!

The electrics should hopefully be fine, but the hardware is probably going to be replaced - the machine heads aren't great so that's an excuse to get some new lightweight ones, and I'll probably get a matching bridge too.