Franken Bass!

I have 2 bass guitars sitting around.  One is an 80's Fender PJ bass that I bought 8 or so years ago.  I tried to refinish the body and... well.. it was kind of a disaster.  I did learn a lot though, so that's something.  Number one... if there's a wood veneer on the body... don't remove it.  Number two... stripping paint sucks.

It may look okay from a distance, but I promise you, I did a terrible job, AND I wired it improperly.  I had purchased a pearloid pickguard to go on there, but the body was some weird size, so I cut my own pickguard.


The second is a fender squier PJ bass that someone gave to my girlfriend because it's a POS with a terribly bent neck.  I tried to adjust the truss rod a few years ago and just ended up stripping out the adjustment bolt.  Oops.  The pictures here don't do the neck curvature justice... imagine the curve you see WITH strings pulling it farther.  The action close to the body was about 1/2''.  I was t

As you can see, it's as straight as Elton John

Last weekend I got all fired up about fixing it, so I decided that I was going to replace the truss rod.  In order to do that, I need to remove the fingerboard.  I was a bit worried about damaging it... but the neck is shot anyway, so I decided to go for it.  I learned that the best way to do it is to use a clothes iron on the steam setting to loosen the glue, and then for VERY slowly to avoid damaging the fragile fingerboard.

I sat there for about 2 hours, playing Deus Ex, refilling the iron as needed, making sure things didn't burn, and prying the fingerboard a bit more every 10 minutes or so.  At first, I was making good progress... the finger board was coming up clean and straight... but once I got to the 7th fret it cracked.  By that point I was able to look under the fingerboard where the truss rod *should* be... but it was completely sealed up!  No way to remove the truss rod.  I kept removing the fingerboard for a while for the practice, but eventually gave up and just pulled it off.

Truss rod?  Where are you?!?

Well... foo on that.  I pulled the neck off of the bass I had refinished and fit right in the neck pocket of the Squier.  Wooo!  I also took the opportunity to take the Seymour Duncan Basslines pickups off of the other bass and replace the terrible stock Squier pickups.

Hooray!  Bass Geeetar!  Well... almost.  After I tried to set the intonation, it was a total wreck.  It's WAY flat.  It's so flat that I can't adjust the saddles far enough to get it in tune.  After the fact, I realized that the new neck is a 22 fret, and the old neck was a 20 fret.  The old neck is about an inch shorter.  I either need to move the bridge, or mod it in some creative way to make it work correctly...

Making a fat strat

So,  one of my friends has an old Squier strat and then bought an Epiphone Les Paul, which he traded in after a few years for a Fender Strat.  I guess he misses that warm humbucker tone, so we decided to add a nice humbucker to the Squier to see how it sounds and figure out the process.  If everything works well, we're going to put the humbucker on the Fender in the coming months.

I did completed this a month or so ago, so I only took some pics of the wiring (to remember how it was hooked up) and one of the final product.

I stripped all the parts off of the pickguard and used the humbucker to trace an outline to cut out.  I would love to use a dremel tool but I don't have one... so...  I improvised.  I know this is a terrible method, but I used a pair of large wire cutters to snip off bits of the plastic, and then used a file to smooth out the rough edges.  Gah!  The cuts aren't straight.  I used one of the mounting holes from the old pickup, and since it's the slanted bridge pickup on a strat, the pickup doesn't exactly align with the strings... it's unfortunate, but it works.

Oh yeah... in order to at least partially retain some of the original sound, I added a coil tap to that pickup so he can use it as a single coil.  It's on a tiny little toggle switch that I put in just out of frame on this picture.

The sound gets a little funky when using both the bridge humbucker and the single coil in the middle, but only when the coil tap is off.  I'm not sure how the Squier pickups are wired, but I think one of the humbucker coils is wired opposite the single coil, and they're cancelling each other out.  Anyway... end goal of this endeavor  is to put this humbucker in the Fender guitar, and this was just a way to do it once and make the mistakes now so I don't screw up the nice guitar.

Lessons learned:

1.  If you want it to look pretty, buy a new pre-cut pick guard..

2.  Find a wiring diagram for the guitar.  Gotta make sure all the parts play nice with each other.


Anything else I should take into consideration?  Let me know... soundularelectronics@gmail.com