Thanks. I suppose if one has trouble sourcing long enough E strings they don't all have to go through the body...
Thanks. I suppose if one has trouble sourcing long enough E strings they don't all have to go through the body...
This will be quiet for a while, its going to be some time before I can get down to the workshop to rout the pickup cavities...
Just FYI, this is my old ESB-4 project. I was building it for a good friend who is no longer a friend at all, so I was never going to get it finished. The pickup routing on a curved top kept putting me off from working on it. So I passed it on to Jim who knew about it and was talking about making jigs to do the pickup routing.
I'm pretty sure the Maxon pickup was originally mine and came off an old Wilson Mercury bass (Wilson was a UK firm related to Watkins and WEM building guitars in the late 60s/early 70s). Jim fitted some Mighty Mite P-Bass pickups in it to replace the existing pickups and would have kept the old ones as they were no use to me at the time (early 1980s). The Wilson had a very slender neck indeed, so the pickups had the narrower string spacing that Gibson bases had compared to Fender.
Last edited by Simon Barden; 18-10-2019 at 01:25 AM.
If they sound as good as they look it'll be bitchin'
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One can hope, but the old Watkins Rapier wasn't the best guitar ever made. My memory for that project is very limited: I think it was the one where we converted it to fretless and I created a polished epoxy coating for the fretboard. If Simon's right and that's where the pickup came from (and I can't think of an alternative) then I have a nasty feeling that we wouldn't have replaced the pickups on the Wilson if they sounded great. Still I'm planning to rout for standard pickups, so I can always shell out more dosh and buy some new ones.Originally Posted by fender3x
Now I think of it I've got a rather crude bridge in the bits box that looks a lot like the photos on the Watkins web site : http://www.watkinsguitars.co.uk/basses.htm , so presumably that's the source. I wonder what bridge we put on it. Possibly the original one from my Tokai Jazz: I was wondering why that isn't about.
Last edited by JimC; 18-10-2019 at 03:39 AM.
The site owner seems to like the sound of the pup. Worth a shot. Looks cool in any case.
I used to think my first bass, a used Epiphone Newport was junk. Now they go for $1200 to $1800 on Reverb.
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Unfortunately it's not that particular pickup. It looked more like a standard covered guitar pickup with four screw poles instead of six. But I have no recollection of what the control circuit was like (ages before I knew much at all about these things), so it may have been less than optimal.
I think it was a Schaller bridge that went on the Wilson at that time. It had adjustable saddle width spacing and was right on on its minimum width setting. The bridge on an Aria Cardinal bass was about the same width, but I contacted Aria at the time and they replied that they couldn't sell me a bridge on its own, only a replacement for a damaged and returned original.
Well with an ES you have to build the control circuit outside the bass anyway so you can do some testing before the final installation. I'd have done more if that on my last build. If I had, I am pretty sure I'd have changed some pot/cap values.
I can't attest to their sound since I haven't installed these yet, but I went with these partly because they fit into a standard pup rout, and the blades meant I didn't have to think too much about string spacing.
These are Bill Lawrence, EB-50's. They have wider rails than the guitar pickups, and spec a bit different. If you can find one it might work for you. I sometimes see them NOS. I was able to find two for my project.
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Last edited by fender3x; 19-10-2019 at 01:29 AM.
I'm starting to think about building up the wiring loom. I've never worked on anything without decent access - although my little semi acoustic six string was direct into the body it has a good sized access port. I imagine that industrial quantities of bad language will be involved in trying to get each round peg into the appropriate round hole, but are there any tips about how much cable to leave between components? Too long of course will rattle and be noisy, but is it liable to be easier to juggle into place with just say 10mm of slack between components, or would something like 40mm or 50mm be more appropriate?
Last edited by JimC; 21-10-2019 at 10:34 PM.
Best with no slack whatsoever. Trace the holes on paper, stick it on some cardboard and use that as the template to make up a wiring loom. With stiff-ish cable, the pots and switches should then all stay in roughly the right places, making it a lot easier to insert the loom and get all the shafts popping up in the right places. Get it right and it's a 5-minute job to install, mainly just using fingers and needle-nosed pliers.
Long thin wires just make things far worse, with more chance of pots tangling and every pot/switch/jack has to be done on its own.
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