Christian Thomas takes pliers to his dusty old bass.

Ah, my old Tanglewood 5 string. It was my third bass ever. It was my first 5 string and my first active bass. As the years rolled by and more money came in, it quickly became a backup bass. I actually went and bought a new 5 string the day my drummer knocked the Tanglewood over in practise...I mean seriously, drummers are just so rude aren’t they?

The poor thing was silently aging in a hard case when I decided I wanted a fretless. I'd always thought about getting one, but figured that it was a step up in talent - and what if I didn't get on with it?

I had a trawl on the internet and to every luthier's chagrin, I thought "yeah I can do that".

I set about the frets with a hammer and chisel and blowtorch...or a pair of pliers. If you're going to do this, I suggest strongly that you get some end nippers. Also, tape along the edge of the frets as well.

Very carefully I took out the frets, and I was lucky that there weren't any major chips or breaks. Then being impetuous I had a couple of goes with the now fretless. This was probably the biggest mistake I made! The roundwounds I was using chewed the hell out of the fretboard. I left the bass for a couple of weeks due to being away at Christmas, and then finally got round to the finishing the job bit.

I filled the frets carefully with putty. At the time, I was thinking about my patience levels, so I was very careful as I filled the frets, because I didn't want to create too much sanding afterwards. But if you have to sand quite a lot, but then make sure you don't take away too much fretboard!

Even taking care, it looked awful, but I wasn’t worried about that as it would look much better. Even with my lack of skills.

I sanded it all down after a couple of hours - and lo and behold, it looked a bit better.

I went down to a very fine sandpaper to get the fretboard as smooth as possible. With hindsight I'd have spent more time on this - but I know what I'm like with sanding, and I would have ended up with sanded holes everywhere!

Then I taped up around the neck and over the nut and started the whole coating process. I used exterior grade lacquer and applied it in thin layers. The first couple of coats took a long time to dry off, but I was able to apply around three coats a day. In the end I put ten coats on - I'm paranoid about the strings cutting into the fretboard again, but I also read that Jaco had several layers on his fretboard. I guess if it is good enough for him...

And that's where I am at the moment. I've bought some new flatwounds which should be a bit more sympathetic to the fretboard, and give a nice fat thunk added to the fretless mwah!

I have other things to look at - I am not entirely sure about dropping the height of the nut, and apparently there's a bit of work to get the intonation right, but that's all the fun of doing this kind of thing yourself.

At some point, I'd like to recoat the body, and I will put in some new pick ups - but that is probably a bit in the distance!

To sum up what I found and what I would do in the future. I'd:

As it goes, I’ve written a couple of tracks using the fretless, and the bass has seen the light of day more times in the last few months than it had done for several years beforehand. So go ahead and free that unused bass!