Mr. Foxen

I've seen a sweet custom with one, built to be a P style:



www.gwbasses.com bigging him up because he always has time to give me guidance on mods and stuff I'm working on.

Hi Lorne, I recall you from the Ugly forum, you should visit there again too.

If you can use a blended signal somehow they work ok, I have seperate outputs from the two pickups on my bass and run one throught effects and one clean then recombine into amp wia a stereo eq, gives guitar sounds and keeps the bass there. Alternatively I canuse the fx loop in my Proco Juggernaut.

I did a defret on my first bass, when I got a Wishbass, I decided to refret it, rosewood board, and only glue and rosewood dust in the slots.

I bought some fretwire on ebay, came cut in 2 fret strips, and already curved, which is the hard part. Cleaned out the slots, which was the worst part, involved lots of masking tape to protect everything. Once the strips were clear, I cut a piece of wire with some overhang, enough to poke over the edge, but minimal to save filing later, made sure I supported as much of the neck as possible, put some wood glue in the slot and tapped the new fret in with a block of wood and a rubber mallet, many small taps rather than one big one, figured les chance of bending anyhting or dinging the fret that way.

Basically took my time over it and thought every bit through, covered everything in lots of masking tape, once they were all in, keep the tape on, filed the ends roughly, pulled one out and redid it because I hadn't cleaned the slot and it was proud. Got a very straight piece of hard wood and fine wet and dry paper and flattened the tops of all the frets, any that were obviously proud got a tapping with wood and mallet. didn't take much to get them all even, since there was only a small flat on the top dressing them to round didn't matter, not it plays just fine, although polishing the fret ends took ages, and keep the tape on for this.

That was pretty stream of conciousness, but you should get the gist of it.

[quote name='Machines' post='42063' date='Aug 6 2007, 05:26 PM']Looks like they share some features Staggs do - possibly from same factory ?

I'd say as a cheap backup bass you can't go wrong. As a main instrument ? No thanks.

EDIT: I'd fancy this though.. kind of a Jaguar meets Stingray.

[url="http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/WESLEY-MARK-II-COUGAR-SONIC-BLUE-ELECTRIC-BASS-GUITAR_W0QQitemZ290146104924QQihZ019QQcategoryZ4713QQtcZphotoQQcmdZViewItem"]http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/WESLEY-MARK-II-COUGA...oQQcmdZViewItem[/url][/quote]

I keep eyeing them up, I really like the look, and standard replacement parts would cheerfully fit, so could probably make a very reasonable bass out of one. As long as its not plywood or something.

The Johnson basses, the P and J copies at lest, are pretty reasonable, solid wood bodies too, I got one to use as a base for various mods, it was ok to start with, became pretty good with all hardware replaced.