Here's my modified JZ-6, finished today with the arrival of new knobs.
This was a factory second body with some mended cracks (and some not mended cracks as well!) As I was planning on a solid finish, that wasn't a problem.
The neck and centre pickups, the blade switch, and the tone pots are stock, as are the bridge and the tremolo unit.
The bridge pickup is an Iron Gear Tesla Shark, coil split with a push/pull volume pot - wired backwards because it was out of phase with the middle pickup.
The machine heads are Grover mini locking tuners. It's necessary to unwind the wrap on the three lowest strings and use the core for locking. I'm using D'Addario EXL156 Nickel Wound 24-84 Fender Bass VI Strings.
I replaced the speed knobs with some no-name oven style knobs.
The scratchplate was custom cut by Tiny Tone. I don't have the tools, patience, or skill to cut one myself.
Because the stock build has all three pickups crammed in the upper half of the space between the bottom of the neck and the bridge, I customised the build. I chiselled out a cavity for the humbucker, and evenly spaced all three pickups. The middle pickup falls dead centre between the neck and the bridge - pretty much where the pickups sit on a P Bass.
The stock tone pots are clearly linear, and basically do very little between 10 and 3, and then fall off a cliff between 3 and 0. I will probably replace them some time in the future, but I don't really use tone pots all that often, so there's no rush.
I used Wudtone T-Bird finish, with their extra gloss clear coat. I used no grain filler, because I wanted the grain of the ash body to show through.
The neck required very little work, and the action is great. This is a really nice playing instrument.
And it sounds great! Even the cheap stock single coils sound good. This has a really nice edgy rasp to it.
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