When Modding Goes Bad, next on FOX.. Lets see/hear the modding horror stories.

[ibanezcollector]

Ok this should be a fun thread.. Lets hear or see those little ideas that sounded good at first or had good intentions then went horribly wrong, or tons of money spent on something only to be worthless in the end due to misfortune or just plain old stupidity.



I will go first when I first started modding about 10 years ago, I never dealt with tuner ferrules and when I was putting them back in I was whacking it with a hammer, sounded like a proper technique at the time and worked on the first 3.. Then Crack snapped the headstock right off.. LOL..

Now I know the proper way to put string ferrules in.. Lesson Learned the hard way..

 

[Lasernoob1337]

I've done tons of stuff like that, but not on a bass. I'm too protective...

 

[BigNoise]

Installing tuners on a jaz neck and bam! I drilled right through the headstock....that sucked

 

[mjolnir]

I've never really done extensive cosmetic work beyond sanding a neck down or refinishing a body, so I've never done horrible damage to a bass, but I got a couple things I screwed up...

I was cutting a pickguard to fit the somewhat odd single coil P body I have when I got the bright idea to slice right through the section that was supposed to fit over the top horn. My solution? Drill new screw holes in and attach it as a separate piece, let people think I did it on purpose.

Whenever I refinished that body (it was made in the 60's, had a wicked poly finish on it) I didn't give enough attention to the sides of it, didn't quite get all the primer off, so when I went to stain it the stain didn't take nearly as well as I would have liked, so every time I play that bass I have to look at that and be reminded of how my impatience rewarded me. I let people believe I did that on purpose too.

I can't even count the number of times I screwed up electronics work whenever I first started. There was one time I was working on one of my basses, tested all the work I'd done (it all worked then), screwed everything back in place, then took it to a show. It died in the middle of the first song, and I had no backup. Talk about an epic fail...

 

[bassman314]

I was fixing a reverb a few weeks ago. Some idiot had "fixed" it earlier, and in the process completely ungrounded the entire circuit.

All you got was nasty buzz.

I had to reground the whole circuit, including the switch.

Well, the switch was one of those inexpensive plastic rocker switches, and when I removed the solder from the terminals, I must have left it on too long, as the switch started to melt, and the terminal came loose.

Luckilly, the design of the circuit was such that the other side of the switch was just open. I re-wired everything to the other side, and it all works, except the indicator LED to tell me the unit is on. It's plugged into my Furman PS on my rack, and therefore if my rack is on, it's on.

Then there was the time I tried to mod my ODB-3... The PCB is missing a bit of copper in places. I didn't know about soldering braid at that time....

 

[bongomania]

I had the bright idea to install a new wooden neck on the body of an old Kramer aluminum-neck bass. That involved routing a new neck pocket, as the aluminum neck just had a relatively thin strip of metal extending into the body, not the full width of the neck. The only problem was I didn't have a proper router, just a Dremel tool and a chisel. And I was impatient, and not super experienced/knowledgeable at use of the tools at hand. And I didn't have a work table, or even a garage or basement, as I lived in a small apartment at the time, so I did the work out on the sidewalk.

Let's just say it took several hours, and a lot of sweat, and bloody scraped-up knuckles, to turn a perfectly good bass body into an ugly and unusable hunk of scrap wood.