Mine was converted by a luthier who carefully removed the frets and inserted strips of darkened maple. You will see tiny little marks where the frets were anchored to the surface of the fretboard. Anyway, the bass still sounds as good as before, if not better.
The main issue was with string height. The adjustable nut sits on a small brass base plate. The nut height for a fretted bass is obviously higher than for a fretless, so you want to lower the nut. That's where the base plate gets in the way, because most people will already have it at mimimum height on a fretted instrument.
What I understood from Mica is that the base plate can be taken out, but that this leaves the headstock wood veneer vulnerable as the allen screws will rest on wood veneer instead of brass. So if you adjust the nut later on you might see some form of superficial cracking.
You can of course file off the excess brass from the underside of the nut, and leave the base plate as it is. And I'm sure you can get a slimmer nut from Alembic, if you ask nicely.
To be honest, I haven't put the nut base plate back on my Epic - I'm keeping it in a safe place, of course. I adjusted the nut height after a while because the luthier set it too low, with the strings bending just a little bit over the edge of the fingerboard, and I thought it was giving me intonation problems. I'm happy to say there's no noticeable cracking - yet.
Put Thomastik Infeld Jazz Flats on it to make it sing!
(Message edited by Adriaan on February 11, 2003)
(Message edited by Adriaan on February 11, 2003)
