I have often been asked “Can you make a Ridgewing bass?”, and I have had to answer “Yes, but…”, and see only a dim cork-screw development path disappearing in the far mist. My hands are full now just with this first guitar.

But then I got to thinking - how small could you make a full-size Precision Bass if you really tried, applying all your Ridgewing trickery? As you can see above, it turns out pretty small. In fact, it could fit in the regular Ridgewing airline carry-on attaché case. And that would include an instant string-tensioning lever in the headstock.

The main design problem is that the neck shaft would have to be divided into two pieces. Some very careful machining could make the necessary joint precise, rigid and seamless, but you couldn’t have a continuous tension rod. Or maybe each half of the split neck shaft would have its own mini-tension rod that could be adjusted independently of the other.

The original Steinberger headless basses did without a tension rod due to their super-rigid continuous carbon-fiber construction. That fret profile better be perfect, because you would be living with it for a long time.

In the building of the first set of Ridgewing guitar prototypes, the first two or three didn’t have tension rods because we thought the carbon fiber construction would be rigid enough. However, we were wrong.  ALWAYS have an adjustable tension rod.

As a design exercise, we looked to see how a standard P-Bass neck would fit to a standard Ridgewing body. Quite strangely, as it turns out.

Here, a P-Bass neck and bridge at their normal distance are fitted into a Ridgewing body such that the bass bridge mechanism would be integrated into the standard Ridgewing bridge body. That headstock is HUGE!

Interestingly, the neck, which already looks huge next to the Ridgewing body, would have to be even longer to fit properly into the Ridgewing neck pocket.

So it ends up looking like trying to adapt a P-Bass neck to a Ridgewing body would be a bad match, like making a flying submarine. The thing to do is break up the standard P-Bass body and neck into interlocking modules with Ridgewing-like joinery.