Modded Squire Bronco "Special" - two pickups!

It's "special" because some models distinguish one-pickup from two-pickup models this way!

So, this bass started as a regular unremarkable black Squier Bronco "Affinity Series" - it's a very cheap 30" scale bass with rudimentary bridge and tuners and a single coil pickup from a stratocaster. With its 6 poles hidden under a plain white pickup cover.
I've bought it because I wanted a shortscale, and the Gibson LP Junior bass I've got just before was defective. Had to send it back to the store and rage bought the cheapest shorty I could find



I've got it the very last day before lockdown and having more free time, decided to mod it to make it better.
The idea was to first add a second pickup, bit over the period of two months it all evolved even more - I ended up changing its bridge and tuners, and getting two strat-sized dual blade humbuckers too.

In the following messages I'll post some of the progress pictures for those of you who may want to do the same to your Broncos.

Go!

 

Allright, first thing is to create a template for the pickup rout - a MDF sheet, a jigsaw, two files (flat and round) and some time later it's there:



Routing out the pickup cavity - even during the routing I had a very big suspicion: it smelled absolutely like ash.
Squiers aren't supposed to have ash bodies, are they?
Well, it smells like ash, it looks like ash and it feels like ash, I guess it isn't a duck :





By the way, carbon paint everywhere in the electronics cavity - Squier doing it better than Gibson here. The LP JR DC I've sent back, had no trace of shielding anywhere at all.
To keep up, I've painted with carbon paint the new bridge pickup cavity too.

 

After that, I've added a three-way switch between the pots and installed a second strat pickup ("donated" by my very much unused Affinity Stratocaster)

And like that the bass lived for about a month.

White sock alert!



Was it better - sure, I had two more sounds!
Was I satisfied?

No

The worst thing with the Broncos are the crappy tuners - difficult to tune and not precise at all.
But the two-saddle bridge is pretty horrible too. Also being mostly neck pickup player, the single coil hum and noise bothered me. The next message will describe the following mods!

 

The tuners - this was easy, I had already four nice black Gotoh style tuners lying in my parts box from the past projects.
The bridge wasn't tough to find either, the same parts box revealed four individual one-string bridges, also black! Now, the theme announced itself - what was missing is a black pickguard, black potentiometer knobs and black pickups.

The only thing I had to buy were the pickups - after some search on ebay, I found cheap but nicely looking stratocaster-size humbuckers:





For those of you who are interested: Vintage look hot rail humbuckers 8.5k P74 | eBay
these are generic cheap hot rails clones under fancy covers. I've seen similar ones sold under GFS brand (but not as cheap).

I've got four two for the Bronco and two for my Squier Strat (it's an HSS and the single coil noise always bothered me)

Then I made the pickguard out of a blank 3-ply sheet, cut it out with a jig saw, files and a cutter blade to make a bevel.

Another look at the ash wood visible in the neck pocket:


New tuners (I had to drill the holes larger, from 12 to 14 mm)



New individual bridges positioned to keep the original saddle pitch (18 mm):


The pickguard


And black speed knobs!

 

The electronics diagram just in case. The only thing added here is the 3 way switch, everything else is stock (except I rewired the tone pot the way I like)



And the final result!

 

Like what?

 

I like seeing numbers! Knowing my tone pot is at 6.5 and not "in the middle-ish" is nice

 

The looks kind of suggested itself - just reused what I had already
I also like true black & maple looks, this helped!

 

You can't see on the photos, but I've also got the Gibson style pot position markers there

 

Now, how does it sound?
What I can say is that it certainly isn't worse than before
The pickups are good - not too trebly, not too muddy, just in the middle how I like it. The string-to string balance is great, there are no strings that are too loud or too soft.

I've already recorded quite a number of sound clips on this bass - before, during and after the mods. I you're interested, it's all here: YouTube

three covers that I've made after the mods were done:

The strings are GHS Brite flats, heavy gauge (G is .48)

both pickups:


both pickups:


neck pickup only:

 

Wait a sec, these aren't Bronco necks!