Mediocre Polymath

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).

I've now got to summon the courage to do the waterslide decal on the body. I was always crap at these when I made airfix models as a kid. Used to get my older brother to do them most of the time. That said... I've not tried to apply one since I was about 10 years old, so perhaps I've gotten better at it. I took some pictures and reproduced the original logo in Affinity Designer. I got them printed up as decals (along with the logo I used for my own designs) by a company called Rothko & Frost. I had intended to just exactly reproduce the logo that was on there originally, but – as an editor – I can't countenance such wonky typesetting. I'll also try to put it on straighter than the original decal. I've noticed from looking at pictures of these basses online that the decals are noticeably wonky on about half of them.

Right. The paint has mostly cured now, and I've taken the masking tape off to reveal the final look. I still need to do the clearcoat, but the only thing that will change from this look is the level of shiny-ness. I decided that I was going to lean into the description "poor man's Status" that was often applied to these basses when they were new. It looks a little wonky on the front because the pickup routs are slightly wonky. You can't tell once the pickup surrounds are in place though. If you look closely you can see a thin (like, less than 0.5 mm) line of barbie pink on the edge of the masked off area. I'm not sure whether to keep that visible as a little in joke to myself, or to knock it back with a little bit of red sharpie.

I use an EHX Bass Soul Food to do just this. For me it's an always-on, very low gain pedal. Just there to put a bit of hair on things. I think there's one currently for sale on the marketplace for not very much.

There isn't really a clear "I want to play bass" moment for me. It was an impulse that just bubbled up to the surface from the teenage primordial soup of dumb ideas, anxieties and dreams. When I was 14 or 15, a few of my friends at school started to play the guitar, as did my older brother. I thought they seemed really cool and wanted to join in. My dad would probably let me play his old bass, I knew that, but I was ultimately too chicken to try. At the time, I thought of myself as unteachably inept at any sort of physical skill – I was crap at sports, a risk to myself and others in a workshop and had displayed a spectacular lack of musical ability throughout my childhood. I figured trying to play an instrument again would just be setting myself up for embarrassing failure. At around the same time, oddly, I also developed a sort of nagging and largely irrational anxiety about the prospect of learning to drive. Like, I was aware that this was a thing – a physical skill – I'd need to do, and I was concerned that I would turn out to be just as bad at that as I had been at everything else. I started thinking that perhaps I should try to learn to do something (play an instrument? juggle? knit?) to reassure myself that I was capable of learning something new. The final piece of the puzzle came on a day when I was off school and bored. I was playing 1080 Snowboarding for the N64, and set a time on the "Crystal Lake" run that was genuinely world-beating. Well, perhaps not world-beating, but definitely fast enough that I could write into the magazine if I wanted, get my name in print. I sat there, looking at my character celebrating on the screen, looking out of the window at the sunny summer's day I was avoiding, and had a sudden urge to do something – anything – more productive than this. Something that might make people think I was cool, something that girls might think was cool. I went upstairs and pulled my dad's old bass out of a cupboard. I downloaded the tab for "Dammit" by Blink-182 and started awkwardly plucking the notes. With help from my brother and my dad, I beat my expectations and got surprisingly good surprisingly fast. Haven't stopped playing since. It never did help me get any girls though, and I never did learn to drive.

Hi there. Sorry I completely forgot about this. Here's the voltage selector, looks to be on 120/240 for mine.

I'll have a look in the morning.

Happy update. Got a can of Kobra "Venom Red" from the local DIY store and this is the colour I was hoping for (going for an Audi Quattro sort of a colour scheme).

There's always a moment when you look at the paint drying and think "maybe I can make this work?", but no. I can't pull off a hot pink bass.

Sigh. So this is what Montana Color call "Fire Engine Red". Oh well, off to buy more paint I guess.

I looked in my parts bin, as for some reason I kept the truss rod when I binned the neck from my old OLP MM2, but sadly I think I decided "what possible use could anyone have for an old OLP truss rod" and threw it away a few months ago. That said, I remember the spoke wheel being welded on, so perhaps it was a different design. If the adaptor doesn't fit, you can always try pulling the truss rod out and replacing it. They're double action rods in a straight rectangular channel – you can generally pull the out if there's no tension on them.

When I was in my late teens I bought a compressor. I'd been told by the received wisdom of the internet that compressors were good and important, so I went up to Denmark street with my supermarket paycheck. I had also been told that Tech 21 were a great company, and given that I knew very little about what a compressor was supposed to do, I opted for the Tech 21 one – a pedal called the Bass Compactor. The problem was that the Bass Compactor is absolute, unmitigated balls. Like, I've played through plenty of T21 stuff since and loved it, but that pedal was awful. It was effectively a one-knob compressor (ratio) with the other controls being output vol and a 2-band EQ. It didn't behave like any other pedal I've heard since, with this strange make-up gain thing that was coupled with a really aggressive noise gate. With the ratio at 1:1 it sucked the life out of everything and it only got worse from there. It put me off compressors, and effects pedals of any kind, for about 15 years.

Trick is to go for the one for tomatoes, it doesn't have any internal shelving. It's not the sturdiest thing – its ok with the weight of the Hohner, and could probably cope with a body and a neck separately, but it would buckle under the weight of, say, an Ibanez Musician or an Aria SB.

Two more days were spent filling the exposed ends of the fret slots with lacquer, which is a slow process of dripping stuff in with a pipette and then filing it down. After that I was ready to start painting in my newly aquired (from Argos) spray booth/greenhouse. I was a little stumped by how to hold an instrument that has no tuning peg holes or neck pocket to use, but decided on a big M-10 eyebolt through the jack socket hole. And here's how it looks as of right now. Don't worry, this is just the first step in what will be a fairly elaborate finish.