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A splendid offer, but there's an extra 33€ for delivery to France, and it's not available on Amazon.fr, so I shan't be taking it up. Thanks for the 'heads up', though.

I can’t think of any problems, I use the regular long scale on my string-thru Mustang basses and they work fine. Ok the string-thru probably adds on an inch or so but that’s still 31” compared to 34”.

Currently £52 delivered with Amazon Prime.

Bought a Bronco recently. Modified it. Now it looks like this Brief project diary HERE for the curious.

Stunning @ped Love the p'up cover colour too

I did the same, but I got my XL2 very early in the sequence, so in my eyes, there really wasn't anywhere to go up to. And for a very long time, my only, or one of 2 basses.

skip to the end, and here it is! (except this is with the nut in it's 'still pretending to be brass' state) The pots are the original ones that came with the bass. A pair of 250k pots which I've wired as volume - tone - 3 way selector switch. If there's any electronics boffins reading, can you help me with something? The bass had a .22 capacitor, but I replaced that with a .47 one. The only thing is, the tone pot has *basically* no effect. It's not absolutely zero, in which case, I could just assume the pot isn't doing anything, but it's just slightly more than zero. There is an absolutely miniscule difference between fully open and fully closed. Capacitor problem? Pot problem? Something else? Anyway, despite the lack of tonal variety, the sound is much-improved from the stock Bronco.

Andy Fairweatherlow in Solihull this Saturday.

Now, the headstock of the Bronco drives me up the wall. When I was looking at the photo I'd dragged into Photoshop, I assumed there was some kind of glitch or maybe just something weird with that specific bass. Then my real one arrived and it had the same thing. There's a weirdly-awkward curve to the bottom edge where it goes kinda straight between the D and G tuner., so I brought it to the belt sander to sort it. Here's a fade between the stock shape and my alteration. The bass comes with a plastic nut, but I had a "brass" nut in my shoebox that was the right width E-G but slightly too thick, so I routed a groove in some mdf, stuck the "brass" nut in there and brought it to the sander until it was the correct thickness. This process caused the brass to fall off what was actually some other metal, so I blowtorched it until it went black and blue and purple in a fun way. Having routed the bridge pickup cavity and caused a paint chip at the E string entry point, I got my acrylics out and mixed up some Tahitian Coral. This turns out to be mostly red, some white, and then some yellow to taste. The bridge comes with these whopping 12mm threaded inserts but this is overkill tbh, because I've already got five screws in the thing. However, I like the look of these little doohickeys so, rather than drill two deep holes in the body, I just drilled enough for the bolts to stick into, with a wee dab of glue to keep them in place.

Popping out to see Weeds @Leonard Smalls in town at the weekend , defo 3 of us , maybe more , really looking forward to it 👍

for anyone looking for a Radial Stagebug, one has popped up in the Classifieds HERE, I have no affiliation to the seller but they have a good reputation on here. I was tempted but I think i 3 radial di boxes is enough for now. Matt

In the wee small hours of the morning - Frank Sinatra

I wanted to completely sure the silks wouldn't sit on the saddle and I don't feel like tapewounds can be cut or bent super-tight. The controls are volume, master tone and a three-way switch.

Hey all, I noticed on Amazon that the same guage Elixir strings are a tenner cheaper if you get XL extra long scale. I don't need extra long scale but are there any disadvantages in me saving some money here? 45-105 Elixir long scale £48 45-105 Eiixir extra long scale £38 Thanks! Mike

I won't bother explaining it but I went about the pickguard in the wrong order and binned my first attempt. Luckily the sheet of plastic was big enough to get two out of it, so this is the second version. The metal control plate went well but aluminium gets so gummy when cutting or sanding. So, for the record, I cut out the silhouette of the pickguard, refined it on the belt sander and then scraped the 45 deg bevel with a utility knife. I then drilled the screwholes and screwed it in place before marking out the pickup hole so it was definitely perpendicular to the strings in the end. This also meant that I could later use the neck pocket as a routing template with a bottom bearing bit. right, E string time. I drew what I guessed was an angle similar to the break angle of the bridge. I don't think tapewound strings can take a 90 degree bend. That's not something I've tested - I may be dead wrong - but they just feel like they shouldn't be bent that severely. I have a disassembled LÄMPLIG trivet from IKEA that comes in handy around the workshop. In this case, it forms a metal lining for the 'tunnel' and won't let the ball-end pass through. Oops. Chipped the paint. Surprisingly fragile. After this photo, I hammered it in enough so that the ball-end of the string is within the body. Oh look, @Burns-bass has one for sale right now, and willing to post! Somebody get on that, toute suite.

I've been really looking forward to this one. The demos make it sound capable of a ridiculous variety of tones. The low gain settings sound thick and some of the wilder ones sound very useable for synth bass. This strikes me as the first real competitor to the Doom 2 (but I'd be keen to hear @Sibob and @pilotbicycles's experiences) so it'll be interesting to see how things play out.

Just in case anybody is still following this thread, Amazon are knocking out esun Fire Engine Red PLA+ at around £5 a kg if you buy a pack of four. Just brought sixteen rolls at that price. I suspect it's a glitch as every other roll is 2.5x higher. https://amzn.eu/d/4FvltQb Rob

I'm doing a refurb on an old Ibanez SR500, and I've just taken the Bartolini Mk1s out. My original plan was to replace them with something from Nordstrand (like a bigrig), but double-checking the dimensions, something seems off. All the Nordstrand 4-string soapbars seem to either come in EMG35 (don't care), or "Bartolini BC" size (32mm x 101mm). However, measuring my Mk1's, they seem to be 32mm by 108mm(!). Some more research suggests this is the "Bartolini P2" size. There's lots of pickups that come in P2 size. Problem is, they're all 5-string. Most 4-string seem to come in the shorter "BC" size. Am I stuck? Does anyone (apart from Bartolini) make a good pickup in this size? Does it matter and can I just shim a BC size pickup in place (sounds complicated)?

No-one showed Jimi, either ...

It's easy to forget nowadays, but for a very long time I mostly had one bass at a time, at the most two, and I had to sell that bass in order to buy whatever I fancied to replace it. I figured it was better to have one or two good basses than a few cheaper ones. This back in the days when most inexpensive instruments were pretty poor. From when I started playing I always aspired to the best quality instruments, and I was in a process of progressively trading upwards from that point. Having a few basses is a luxury I really appreciate nowadays, even if I not using most of them regularly. I just like having them around.

Request: If anyone has a bass (normal or 6 string piccolo variety) with a Fishman Fluence pickup I'd be very grateful if you could bring it. Reason being I've been reading and seeing a lot of chatter about them and want to hear what it's all about. Looking forward to it. See you all on Sunday