Next up on the blog is a repair for a former student of mine Rachel. She had a couple big concerts coming up and unfortunately had a broken nut on her favorite bass. Also, when I got the bass, she told me that the battery wasn't sitting securely in the battery box.
I started off by tackling the broken nut. I ordered a bleached bone nut blank from Stewmac and hand shaped it to fit the nut slot.
Then I marked my bottom point and did a little shaping before I carved the nut slots out.
After that I strung it up and found the strings were a little high, so I removed a bit more from the slots. Once the strings were sitting at the right point I glued the nut in and strung it up. Came out perfect!
Then I decided to tackle the battery box issue. Thankfully I had the exact same battery box in the shop. So I opened up the control cavity to see what was going on. This particular bass is upgraded with Bartolini pickups and a Bartolini Preamp. Thankfully for me, the battery box leads were just soldered to the battery wire leads from the preamp so didn't have to do any crazy soldering. Here is a pic of the control cavity opened up and the original battery box removed.
And here are the new battery box leads soldered to the preamp leads.
And finally the new box installed and everything closed back up.
Then I checked everything out. Plugged it in and everything was great. Because I replaced the nut I had to do a setup. This thing took a setup pretty well. Tightened all the hardware and gave it the usual LowDown cleaning treatment. Here it is all strung up and setup.
14. Rachel's Yamaha 5 String
- Replaced broken nut with hand carved bleached bone nut
- Replaced broken battery box
- Setup, cleaned, tightened hardware
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