J.B. Player Precision Bass Rescue and Setup, Take Two

Dig that pink insulation!

This is the rewired P-Bass...maybe I should call it a P/J since it has both styles of pickups?

I just stuck a new DPDT switch on it and wired it up so the middle position is both pickups, and either side is the front or back pickup.  Pretty much your standard Telecaster or Gibson-style wiring.  I took some of the length out of the leads that had been added.

The bass also has 500k pots in it; usually we have 250k for single coils.  Go figure.  I'm leaving it as it. 

I took the neck off and found that there's a fifth screw to adjust the tilt of the neck.  I don't suspect I'll use it.   I need to do a truss rod adjustment since there's a lot of backbow in it.  Turns out it only took about a half a turn to make it nice and straight.

If you look closely, you can see some bits for my next big project.  Does that look like a Fender-style circuit board?  Hmmmm.....bwahahahahahahaha!

I took a weak mixture (maybe like 30:1...I didn't measure) of Simple Green and water to the body of the bass.  Cleaned up nicely.

At this point in these kinds of jobs when I'm doing semi-mindless work, I usually find that I mull Stuff over.  Or, mull over Stuff.  In this case, it was one of my pet peeves.

As you may or may not know, Leo Fender, among all his other great accomplishments, invented the electric bass.   You can read far more about that elsewhere, but the electric bass freed bass players up from hauling around and playing big acoustic 'doghouse' basses.  It also gave them the ability to be heard in the band above those pesky horns and piano players!  Not to mention geetar players who were starting to play electric too.  (Remember this was the early 1950s).

Finally, he put frets on the thing so the bass player could play...precisely in tune.  Hence the name of the first electric bass - the Precision.  I think it was even more revolutionary than the Telecaster in some ways.

Anyway back to my peeve.  It's a bass.  It has 4 strings.  It is not a "bass guitar."  A bass guitar would have 6 strings and be tuned an octave or so lower than a standard guitar (and yes, such animals exist).  It just bugs the heck out of me when people say "bass guitar" cause it ain't!

Back to our bass...I took some metal polish to the pickguard screws to clean em up.  I also used my usual Novus plastic polish on the pickguard.

Then I wax de whole ting with some good wax!  Nice and shiny now.