I came across many geniuses at work on these forums. From suggesting simply using a different cable to drilling a new hole in your bass to provide a missing Active/Passive switch.
So I am curious if some of these “Do it yourself” artists would mind to share what they have modified on their instruments and/or their gear and it worked for them well enough!
This is the discussion that inspired me. Let that be the first DIY example! Thanks to heroes of the past hour @howard and @Korrigan …
I haven’t done it yet but I have been brooding about replicating this PCB of this EQ and making the active/passive switch a real active/passive switch bypassing everything. I could also consider put a switch with more terminals allowing a third position…
Not because I fear running out of battery but I am curious about the native sound of these bad boyz…
I’ve only put new pickups and pots in my Fender P @Fahri. Simple job especially as the pots are a no soldering set up.
On my cheap p bass I’ve added the MIM pickups and pots. To do that I had to route the body out slightly. I will probably be selling this one on in the near future.
And then I’ve built a couple of kits. Great fun but except for endless sanding they’re really not much of a challenge if you can do a little soldering.
Only changed the pickups on my Squier Affinity. Should have been easy, but I had to do a bit of soldering and routing.
Had I known that, I’d never even bought the pickups. I have a bad tendency to mess up any handy work 
I struggled with the soldering @Krescht until @Jamietashi pointed me in the right direction for the correct solder 
It was worse than my welding and that’s not great 
I’m about to dig into my BA-112 to put the fan on some kind of thermal sensor. Should be fully reversible and no sense for that jet engine of a cooler in a 75 watt amp that I’m playing with the vol at 3 max for maybe thirty minutes at a time.
It also has a bit of headphone bleed, where the sound is muted, but not completely, when I plug phones in. Not sure I’ll be able to do much about that other than cleaning the headphone jack but I’ll at least take a look. That’s what I get for buying secondhand 
Look at it this way. Whoever bought it new had those same issues, but had to pay twice as much for them 
Too true! I got it for a steal and the sound is killer so I’m definitely not complaining about things I can’t change. And the things I can change … I am 
Just replying to save this thread for reading later
There’s a bookmark feature when you click on the 3 dots at the bottom of a post. Quite handy sometimes
Thanks!
While collecting basses, I decided to hack at a BTB SQ400 which I’ve detailed partly before. It’s almost finished, once I’ve sorted some ibanez humbuckers to fit.
It has been:
Converted to headless,
Completely copper shielded, including connecting tunnels.
Retrofitted to the current Ibanez EQ with
All stacked totally OEM Ibanez switches with sweepable mids.
No name Chinese humbuckers.
Three position switches for parallel, single and series.
On the right is an Ibanez Mikro 5 string, with Fishman Fluence pickups and electronics.
SUCH an amazing difference. It’s at Stage One, with just the pickups installed to see if it’s worth proceeding to Stage Two.
It is.
So, off with its head! (once I design a string anchor and have that made)
I also put a three position switch into a G&L 2500 Tribute to get a split single coil option.
A bit of soldering with the right switch sorted that quite easily.
this headless conversion is quite impressive
I was pretty happy with it for my first totally unplanned go at chopping stuff off. Nova Guitar in Brazil supplied the bridge and head. Only thing I changed was using copper washers either side of the string so that the grub screw didn’t trash the windings.
Sweeping the mids down to the bass end and boosting them gives superphat mode.
I would love to hear a comparison (before/after) if it exists
Unfortunately, it had a damaged EQ board when I got it, which was why it was so cheap.
My only attempt at DIY was trying to wet-sand some very fine scratches out of the back of an acoustic guitar. I just made it much worse…
I guess watching a YouTube on how to do something doesn’t make you an expert overnight. 
I wanted to move the Affinity P-Bass discussion here to @terb and @T_dub 's notice.
So I got this fella today for quite the bargain
Already removed the strings and gave a good scrub to the frets with my magic ereaser. The stickyness from the Gray Ducktape residue came off quite easily. The current pick guard is simply plastic… I think the bass stayed in a room where people smoke a lot for a long time and the plate got yellow leaving what is under the Duck Tape pure white…
You cannot get that by paying for it I guess !
@terb I was thinking about the Fender MIM pickups because they were available used. I see most modders put Seymour Duncans on their affinity basses and they are also available as 2nd hand here.
I don’t want to spend more than 50€ to pickups (says the guy who paid 49.90€ to strings just now) but if there are much better ones for small increase of the budget I can wait a little bit more for sure…
What do you guys think of the POTs? And covering the interior with Copper Tapes?
@T_dub tuner pegs and bridge looked solid for now…
I went extremely cheap with my bass (Glarry GP) with the intention of minor mods. Gave a crack at filing fret edges, and basic setup, plus replaced the weak PUPs with some higher output ones (ECS), and changed the Pots to 500K regular sized and added copper foil to cut back on noise.
the ToneRiders Precision Plus are £35 : https://tonerider.com/product/precision-plus/?v=11aedd0e4327
if the stock pots still work, that’s fine
it’s not very useful with an humbucking pickup, a shield on the back of the pickguard is enough in my opinion. that’s what I did on my Jim Harley, I play metal with it (which means a lot of overdrive) and I don’t have any unwanted noise.
