I’m thinking of taking a trade for a Fender Bronco. the idea is just to use it as a frankenbass to play with.
Has anyone routed a P pickup cavity before?
I’m thinking I should be able to handle the routing in the body but if anyone has guidance or can share their experience I would be thankful.
And before you ask I’m only doing this for kicks with spare parts and not expecting anything too amazing from it.
It’s pretty easy on a body with a large pickguard, where the hole borders will be covered. You can do it with a router, or a dremel, or with good old chisels after drilling some holes.
Also the cavity on the Bronco is larger than what is needed for the stock pickup, so you may have very little wood to remove for a P pickup.
And also the Bronco is an excellent choice.
There’s an easy way and really easy way.
The really easy way is to get a plunge router and a StewMac, P bass routing template.
Maybe instead of routing, consider a 51 p bass pickup. I put one (fralin) in a squier bronco and it sounds great. Ive been thinking about picking up another bronco and putting one of these in it just to see how it sounds.
Thanks for the info. Should I route the pick guard or is there a better way to cut that? I’m thinking of going with a reverse P just to make it more fun.
I also want to keep the original bronco pickup since it’s quirky so I’m thinking about a switch for that.
Ok I’ve seen those. I’ll have to take another look. I have a really nice Bosh router but I’ve only really used it to trim doors and build my pedal board.
I thought about it but I have no money to spend rather a leftover P pickup and bridge from an old gio bass.
I heard bronco strings were closer together so I may need to figure you if string spacing works with the “new” parts.
And then there were 5…
This little Fender Bronco shorty needs some love but oh the things I plan to do to it 
I have a bridge from my GIO bass it’ll probably be the first upgrade I do.
I just gave her a nice cleaning and played it for the first time. Such a strange beast but I really like the sound. You’d think there would be more high end but it’s got way more low end than I’d expect.
Guitar pickups have some nice tone to them when played using bass strings. Surprising good tone.
It felt harder than it should have been to tune my E string and the tone of the F sounded off but other than that it was pretty good. Way more fun to play than I would have imagined.
Yep. Drill holes at the corner and cut inside the outline with a coping saw or razor saw. Then sand down to the outline.
Routing or dremeling risks melting the plastic.
Maybe I could fire up my scroll saw… 
The furthest I’d do is to put the 51. I modded my Bronco with another Strat pickup. I would not turn it into a P bass though.
I wasn’t going to turn it into one, just put a P pickup up the neck and add a 3 way switch so I can have the best of both worlds.
Reamers! Good call. It’s the right tool for the job if you need to add radius to an existing hole.
So I broke of a screw in the old bridge I was going to use so new parts are on the way:
-New bridge
-Soap bar/stingray like pickup
-Double stack knob for tone/volume
-pick guard blank
My thought is to move tone to the double stack and use the open hole for a 3 way switch to do some form of pickup variation since this is a 4 wire pickup.
I want to build a varitone style witch to pick between multiple caps but that will be after I finish all of these mods.
