Mediocre Polymath

Oh, more importantly, it's finished! I'll take some better pictures tomorrow when I have some daylight, but here's a decent enough shot of the completed bass. I think it looks rather nice, and it sounds good as well. I've attached a quick bit of noodling, recorded direct into my interface with no tinkering. It's neck position, both pickups on, and bridge position. I've since raised the bridge pickup a little, so it should sound a bit less feeble. Untitled.mp3 Thanks to @Chienmortbb for being willing to part with this project bass, @PaulThePlug for his Hohner/Steinberger knowledge and @Jackroadkill for his 3D printing work. Also, special thanks to the cheap white-and-orange beach towel/workbench cover that stars in many of these pictures. My mum bought from a Leclerc in Brittany during a family holiday about 30 years ago, and it's only recently occurred to me that I have no idea how or when it ended up rolled up in a cupboard in my house.

Mostly wiring and electronics stuff today. I started by sawing the old broken tabs off the front pickup and installing the replacement baseplate suplied by @Jackroadkill. As this isn't going to be a visible part, I didn't bother doing any prep or refinement here other than cutting off a corner to accommodate the cable (which was in a slightly different position to where it was on the baseplate) and using a soldering iron to press some threaded inserts into the plastic. With that done, and the 3D printed surrounds sanded and lacquered, I started putting things together. I don't have any pictures of this, because anyone who has ever wired up a guitar will know that the process is extremely annoying and requires intense concentration. I did it without burning myself, and only had to desolder the whole thing, make a cup of tea, and start again once. Which is good going.

Righty, I'm back from a week's holiday on the Devon coast (lovely) and ready to put the finishing touches on this project. In my time away, the lacquer has had time to fully cure. So the first thing to do was the both tedious and nerve-wracking process of wet-dry sanding the bass to get rid of all the brush marks and runs. This is always a fairly scary process, as you just have to keep sanding (constantly checking things) and trust that you applied the finish thickly enough to be able to smooth out all the imperfections before you go all the way through the clearcoat somwhere. If you blow through it, particularly if its in a very visible spot, you essentially have to just throw up your hands, do a lot of swearing and start the whole process again, which can take a week or two to cure. It's maddening, but I've gotten pretty good now. No issues with this job. Here's what the bass looks like now – I've sanded and polished and polished and polished and polished and polished. I then applied the shielding foil to the control cavity and added the ground wire before attaching the bridge (with thurst bearings fitted now, thanks for @PaulThePlug for the recommendation). I boiled the strings and gave it a rough set-up for intonation and action. No electronics yet. One of the great advantages of headless basses (especially double-ball end ones) is that you can string them up and de-string them over and over again without any problems. I've just spent the last half an hour or so playing it unamplified and it seems pretty damn good. No fret buzzes, and it's really surprisingly loud even with just the wood for resonance. One thing that has thrown me a little is just how chunky the neck is – I'd taken measurements and so I knew in theory that it was a big boy, but I was still a little taken aback when I got it in my hands. It feels more like my dad's 70's EB3 than the jazz and stingray style necks on my custom basses. I'm assuming I'll get used to it in time. Even with the chunky frets, the action could probably go lower than its current position (with the saddles decked on the G and D strings decked) with no fret buzz. Not that it isn't playable now, probably low enough for most players, but I'm picky. I think I can file the bridge saddles down a smidge without problems. Tomorrow I'll prep the 3D printed components from @Jackroadkill and put the electronics together. My plan is to put a basic vol-blend-tone circuit in it for now, and then replace it with something esoteric, filter-based and active down the line if I like the general sound and playability.

That's an interesting thing, good luck. I very nearly bought an SR500 that was in a similar condition and going for about 80 quid, but chickened out at the last minute. I think one of the eras of this bass (I think the mid-to-late 2000s) had a weird matt brown finish that looked like stain, but was actually some sort of extremely thin and fragile lacquer. I think this probably is one of those basses that someone tried to fix. It almost always wore away around where people's hands/picks touched, and as you say, once the protective finish was gone the wood itself wasn't very resilient. The one I was looking at had a 1-cm deep gouge, like a valley leading down to the pickups. Nice basses though, despite all that.

Think this statement doesn't really need any qualifications about effects. Just generally true.

I tried out a whole bunch of options – "Hohner The {my name}", "Hohner The John/Dave/Steve" – but chickened out and went with the original.

That's the long term plan, but for her buying things is apparently a very intensive process, fraught with second guessing and indecision. Possibilities have to researched, options examined, costs scrutinized. I, on the other hand, tend to go "ooh shiny" and get my card out.

So, the measurements of the pickup is the following. Length: 70 mm Width: 38 mm Length to the ends of mounting tabs: 84 mm Width of the mounting tabs: ~13 mm Distance (center to center) of mounting holes ~78.5 mm Does that match up with the dimensions of the thingiverse parts? Incidentally, from playing around with a magnet I think these are reverse-precision bass pickups cast in epoxy soapbars.

Thanks for the very generous offer. Let me quickly measure the actual parts and see how they compare. I'm a floating-thumb player, but the existing pickup surrounds are all manky, scratched and cracked in places. It would be great to replace them if possible (I looked but couldn't find the right kind of low-profile flat-base surrounds).

My wife suggested that, then clapped her hands and said "so I need a 3D printer, you see". She recently changed jobs and is missing her old gigantic workshop with its CNC machines, panel saws and room of 3D printers. I think that would probably be the smart idea, but I'd prefer to get this done in less time than it takes to decide on a model of 3D printer, buy one, make up the STL for the part, print it, etc.

While I'm sitting around, periodically applying more coats to this polyurethane toffee apple, I figure I may as well sort out a few of the remaining issues with the instrument. The big thing to sort out is the damaged front pickup. These basses have a slightly unusual pickup arrangement (for a bass, at least) where the guitar-humbucker-sized soapbars are mounted to pickup rings. The pickups were originally held in place with what my (American-born carpenter) wife identified as No. 2 machine screws. These are anchored into brass threaded inserts that are cast into the tabs on the sides of the pickups. On the back pickup these are still intact and have the appropriate hardware still. On the front pickup the treble side tab has snapped off. I can only assume this happened during the process of fitting the midi pickup system, as I can't see how this fairly sturdy tab could have broken other than if it was dropped onto a hard surface. The previous owner attempted a fix using self-tapping M3 machine screws and a lot of epoxy. They tapped out the surviving bass insert to 3 mm and cut a thread through the oddly rubbery plastic of the makeshift tab they'd glued on. That home-made tab seems to have failed pretty quickly though, and it was broken when it reached me. I have some M2 machine screws and associated threaded inserts to hand, so I'm thinking I'll just cut away both the epoxy tab and the surviving (but retapped) tab and replace them with a single piece of wood or plastic across the bottom of the pickup with M2 threaded inserts. Like so. The pickup rout is flat on the bottom, so I don't need the gap between the tabs. As an interesting aside. The hardware used on this bass is almost all imperial, despite it being a German-designed instrument made in Korea. I'm guessing they were bound by the terms of the Steinberger license to reproduce the hardware exactly, including the No. 2 machine screws for the pickup mountings and the No. 6 woodscrews that are used to mount the bridge and headpiece.

I'm currently brushing on many many coats of water-based polyurethane lacquer. I had two-thirds of a tin of Mann's Extra Tough that I needed to use up, and I don't like using spray cans more than I have to. This also has the advantage of being innocuous enough in terms of smells that I can use it indoors when it rains. Once I've gotten a good thick layer on, I'll sand it down to a smooth finish. It sounds like an odd way of doing things, but it's worked for me on the last seven or eight instruments I've made.

Decal applied. Not perfectly 100% straight, but certainly much closer than the one that was on there originally.

Yeah, I figure I can post them out in the unlikely event that another BC'er is working on a similar project.

Thanks for the tip. I got a full A4 sheet of logos printed, so I have plenty of material to practice with. I just need to find things to stick decals to. The logos are mostly the one I use for my home-built guitars, but I did get four of the Hohner logos printed, plus another four in white (because I wasn't sure how the red would come out).