Link RemovedI got this bass at the end of January. It belonged to a fella who played in a funk rock band. He played primarily slap, and beat the living tar out of this bass. It's seen a lot gigs, and seen a lot of abuse. When I got it, it was grimy, it had really old, dead, mismatched strings on it, it needed oiled and waxed incredibly bad. I went ahead and got it, because I've wanted a Thumb Bolt On 5 string for well over a decade, and I was standing there holding the first real Warwick that I had ever actually had a real chance of owning. I wasn't leaving without the bass. So, I took it home. I had to drive 3 1/2 hours one way just to go look at the bass, so I wasn't planning on going home empty handed anyway. Got home the next day with the bass. For about a week everything seemed ok. It sounded amazing, and I didn't do anything to fix or clean up the bass. A week later it started eating batteries like crazy, and making all sorts of static noises. It also eventually started cutting out like crazy. I'm not real good with electronics, but I asked some questions did some research, did some poking around in the control cavity, and made an educated guess that the preamp had an issue with it. I replaced one of the pots in the stock preamp, with an identical part from another bass. That seemed to fix the problem. Something that bothered me though was that the pickups, especially the middle one, were super worn. The middle pickup looked kind of like it had been melted. The pickups sounded fine, but they were kind of an eye sore. I bought two new pickups, and after months of hemming and hawing, I bought a new preamp too. One day I finally took the strings off the bass and started cleaning it up. I was getting it ready for major surgery. I discovered that two of the tuners had loose posts. The screws on the back of the head stock were tight, and the nut on the front of the head stock was tight, but you could grab the post and wiggle it a whole lot. One night I got on Ebay and found a brand new set of Warwick brand tuners for $60, so that was a no brainer. It took me forever to make all the decisions for the new parts, and it also took forever to save up the money for the parts. As of today it's officially done, the bass is 100% functional, hopefully (surely?!) 100% reliable, and I'm pretty tickled with it. It's got EMG silver series pickups, with the quick connect leads on them. The preamp is an EMG BTC system. Then, it's got the brand new Warwick tuners, and a set of DR Neons. I also had to order one pickup screw, and one pickup screw ferrule from Dan Africano, at the Warwick shop in New York. He was super awesome, and I got the parts pretty fast. I did all of this repair work myself, and I'm very proud of it, and proud of the bass. I cannot wait to start gigging with it.
. The pre in that fortress is an actual mec 2 band. So its legit afaik. I'll shout at you when the time comes.
