This one hadn't seen much play time in the last year or so. Which was a shame, really. I knew she had more potential in her. It was time for this wallflower to get a makeover!
Two things were really bugging me about this one: my sloppy woodworking and the unsightly blemishes that resulted, and its limited tonal palette and cumbersome electronics.
So I took her all apart again, and re-sanded the body to smooth it out some, get rid of the leftover tooling marks, and clean up the tear-out along the edges of the maple. Then I re-finished the body in Tru-Oil, which gives a much glossier finish than the Tung Oil I used originally. Took a while, but it was time well spent. As somebody's wise grandmother once said, "If you don't have time to do it right the first time, it'll take you even longer to do it right the second time." Or something like that....
The other half of the makeover is a nearly complete re-working of the electronics. My original three-volume setup wasn't working for me. At all. What little time I did play it, I discovered that I treated the three volume pots as switches; they were always either all the way on or all the way off. I never used any of the in-between settings. So I ripped out nearly all of it (the PZP-1 stays) and started over.
I admit it - I'm a born-again active guy. I have been having so much fun with the Bartolini, Aguilar, and EMG preamps I put in my other basses, that I decided to drop a
John East BTB-01 concentric two-band unit into this one. The East has some really neat touches, like a boost-only low-freq knob, a high-freq knob that cuts at a lower freq than boost, and a pull-for-bright. Installation is a breeze, thanks to the screw-on pickup connectors and five-pin power/signal connector. It even has a 9V pass-thru that powers the PZP-1! And the packaging is nice and compact, with epoxy over the back half of the circuit board for insulation. The whole thing exudes class and quality.
But how to handle the pickup switching? I considered several options; various combinations of push/pull pots and mini-switches. But I decided to take a chance on the
StewMac Free-Way switch. I was intrigued by it when StewMac first introduced it, and I scoured the web looking for reviews and commentary. Yes, the contacts are fragile, and yes, the switch body is plastic. But the documentation for it is pretty decent, and the mechanism itself seems robust enough. I wired it up only using the "1" side, which was really pretty easy. Doing that gives me the normal neck/both/bridge magnetics in the first three positions, and the same with piezo added in positions four through six. Pretty slick! The only thing I don't have with this scheme is the piezo by itself. But the combination of the mag bridge with the piezo is, based on my earlier experience, nearly indistinguishable, so I don't feel like I'm missing anything really. And I'm glad I was able to come up with a plan that didn't involve additional drilling.
Took me a little while to do all of the wiring, but the end result is immensely gratifying! The East gives much-needed fullness to the low end, and the highs are nice and musical. The bright switch can even add a bit of zing to the LaBella tapes, especially with the piezo engaged! All six switch positions are usable, and different enough, although I haven't had a whole lot of time to put it through its paces with the band.
The only thing I didn't do that I wanted to was convert it to 18V. With the East, the PZP-1, and the Free-Way switch, things are fairly tight inside with just the one battery. So I'm going to see how things go with 9V for now. If I find that I need the other 9V, I'll just have to find a place to stash it.
(Working on restoring all of the prior photos in the thread...)
