alittlebitrobot

No you may not! That is a beautiful bass.

Ridiculous. I made a JJ Mustang from a Bronco for less than half that price. Ok, the MIJ one has better pickups, hardware, electronics and general workmanship, but apart from that..

Excellent 👌 I love a matching headstock. What's the story with that pickup?

True, but it's a slippery slope. It's only a matter of time before somebody chops the first fret off.

For me, this is so much more balanced and aesthetically pleasing than a Rickenbacker, though, and plenty of people love those things, so I do think there's an audience for the Scout. ...but not in this thread 😁 Poor Scout.

I have a 5 string version of the first one you linked to, but that project is as yet unfinished so I don't know if it's any good. But, to @Richard R and @Huge Hands question about turning the wheels under tension; each wheel has a hex socket so can theoretically be turned with the mini hex it comes with. I'll be interested myself to see how the theory holds up in practice. I also have a 4 string OVERLORD OF MUSIC one from a now-disassembled bass I made. It was much improved by the addition of thrust bearings, but the end of the tuners are now a good 90mm from the rough scale line.

That is weird as hell and I love it. Actually, there is one thing I hate about it and that's the tortoiseshell guard. Big fan of everything else.

I suppose one of the issues is that they keep making them. If people in the 90s were looking for 60s-era basses then that's the equivalent of looking at basses from the 80s today, and there's plenty of them knocking about.

I know! But look it up. Any photo you find of a Bronco has this exact shape. It's infuriating 😆 Happy I sorted mine, though.

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

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. EDIT: The tone pot works now! Turns out the capacitor was dodgy. Sounds great now. Very happy

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.

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.

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.