A while back, our singer (and fellow bass player) told me about an old guitar of his that had suffered damage from a fall. I inquired a little further and found out that the guitar was a 70’s Univox/Electra/Teisco ES-335 copy in greenburst. I immediately offered to buy the carcass from him. Later he brought it to practice and just gave it to me.
Fast forward 6+ months when I finally had the new hardware and access to a drill press:
Before I got the guitar body from Ryan, I had already grabbed a NOS Univox bass neck from eBay. I bought it and was waiting for the right body to come along. The neck pocket for the body is a perfect fit for the neck. I’m pretty certain that the basses and guitars of this type were manufactured at the same time, with the only real difference being the position of the pickup routing.
Widening the tuner holes was the most harrowing part - they were just under 1/2″ (for those crappy old Japanese tuners) and needed to be 9/16″ for the MIK tuners that I had ordered. I tried a drill press, but ended up chipping the edges of the paint on the front of the headstock (luckily the washers for the tuners covered my screw-up). You can’t tell from this picture, but the buttons are white pearloid.
The Allparts Hofner-copy tailpiece required some extra holes to be drilled on the edge of the body, so I’m going to fashion a small plate made of pickguard material to go under the tailpiece mount to cover the original holes (the new tailpiece is a little smaller than the original).
A couple more shots:
The finish on the back is a little more vibrant than the finish on the front:
Now I need to get some pickup surrounds created that match the originals (so I don’t have to bother with more routing and hole-drilling). I’ll be using a set of DeArmond Turbo-Jet single coil pickups. Still haven’t decided on the wiring scheme yet. The bridge is a floating Hofner-style.
I was thinking about all the hardware for this bass the other day, and before it’s all done, this will be a ‘MIAJKG’ model - the pickups are MIA (made in America), the bridge was made in Germany, the tuners in Korea and the body and neck in Japan.
Matt Farrow said,
April 18, 2007 @ 7:46 pm
Man, you come up with the coolest combos! I’ve got a suggestion re: wiring scheme. With the holes you’ve got already, the obvious answer is volume / tone, with a 3-way toggle switch on the lower horn. Normally I’d suggest a 4-way rotary on the cutaway but the hole will be too big (1/2″ instead of the 3/8″ for the rotary.) So I’d probably do a pull-pot on the tone control to put the pickups in series. You could also do a phase switch on the volume pot but that’s not really useful for bass. If you can dig up a washer that will make up the difference, the 4-way switch with a chicken-head knob (white, of course!) would be perfect. Bridge, neck+bridge in parallel, neck, neck+bridge in series will get you a great assortment of tones without being overly complicated. Hit me up for a wiring diagram.
Matt Farrow