Rickenbacker 2060 El Dorado Restoration

Up next thru the shop is a personal project I decided to take on. 
A few months back I came across a Rickenbacker bass on craigslist that I didn't recognize. After a little research I found out it is a rare Rickenbacker 2060 El Dorado. From what I can tell they were made in the nineties as a "alternative" to the traditional Rick models. I was looking for a restoration example for the shop and this one seemed to fit the bill. The guy didn't really realize what he had and I got it for a great price.
When I went to pick it up I found it to be in way worst shape than the ad had lead me to believe. But I decided it was still too good to pass up. Here are some pics I took of the bass when I got it home.
The headstock was all dinged up and sporting an odd Aria chrome tuner. 

The maple fretboard was nasty and had cigarette burns by the headstock. Frets were very worn, especially in the lower notes.

The neck and body…

And the pickguard and hardware… it was in pretty bad shape.

I started by removing all the stock hardware and cleaning it. I found out that pretty much all the intonation screws for the bridge were stripped. I managed to get them all off and replaced them with some stock screws I had in the shop.

Got the neck separated from the body. You can see the spider webs and cracks in the finish on the body.

Another shot of the pickguard and electronics, this time with the bridge removed.

Here is a shot of the controls still hooked up. Pretty interesting setup. 3 way pickup selector switch and a master volume and tone control.

And the controls separated from the pickups…

And here is a shot of the underside of the pickups. Another interesting aspect of this bass is the pickup height that is adjusted from some hex screws on the backside of the body.

Here is the body completely stripped of hardware…

The next thing I tackled was the neck. First was to plug the mounting hole from the odd Aria tuner.

The hole for the actual tuning machine was a little bigger than the others but I tried out one of the other stock tuners and it fit reasonably well and seemed sturdy.
Then I started removing the frets.

After that, I sanded down the maple fretboard to remove the gunk.

Then I started tackling the binding. The finish over the binding had become discolored and was chipping off all over the place.

So I started stripping off the chipped finish with a razor blade to make things a little easier for whoever was going to do the finish stripping. Here is a shot of the binding stripped and sanded smooth.

Then I sanded off the finish on the neck with 120 grit and sanded it down to 300. Then I applied a french polish with Tru Oil which came out really nice. Really complimented the subtle flame in the maple. Here is a shot of the headstock after the last coat of Tru Oil.

Next up was to make a new pickguard. I ordered a white sheet from Stew Mac and traced around the original pickguard to get a rough shape.

Then, using double sided tape, I taped the original pickguard onto the rough shaped one and used the original as a template and shaped and sanded accordingly.

And here is the new one side by side with the original.

The neck was ready for the re fret and the body was ready for stripping and re finishing.
After some research I found out about Marty Bell and after seeing his work decided he would be a great candidate for the body refinish. He was great to deal with and had a really quick turn around time and was very reasonably priced for the work that had to be done (especially considering all the binding).
Here some pics Marty sent me after the re finish. He did an amazing job!

Once I got the body back I ordered all the period correct hardware. This bass was originally equipped with Schaller Tuners which are more or less identical to the Scahller M4 tuners which are made now. The bridge was an early model Roller bridge. The newer Schaller Roller bridges have three mounting screws instead of 4 like this early model and the footprint of the early model is slightly different. I was able to find the same exact knobs on the Pick O The Ricks website. I also ordered new gold pickguard screws as well as a new gold input jack plate.
Here are the electronics, knobs and pickguard installed.

And here is the sidejack plate…

And the Roller bridge…

I am still trying to acquire all the necessary tools for a re fret so for the time being I brought this one to my good friend and expert repairman Carl Pedigo (a.k.a The Chicago Bass Doctor) for the re fret. He did an amazing job as usual.
Once I got the neck back from him I installed the tuners and the nut. There is tiny gap from the odd Aria tuner but you can barely see it from the back of the headstock.

Then I hit the neck with some Howards Feed N Wax and tried to buff out some minor scratches that came from Carl's neck jig.

Then I strung it up and started to dial in a setup. I decided to shim the nut to accommodate for the new frets. I filed down the nut slots to get things just right and then dialed in the rest of the setup. Then I screwed the truss rod cover/emblem back on and BAM! Here she is all restored and setup. The bass plays really nicely and the tone of this thing is very unique.

The original neck plate with serial number…

And here are some of the comments from Talkbass.com

- "very nice. love these start-to-finish bass rescue threads. thanks for sharing."

- "Nice restoration on one of Rickenbacker's sleepers"

- "Tslice - excellent refin job. Nothing better than a bass "brought back to life". Congrats!"

- "Man I don't know how I missed this when you first did it wow is that pretty congrats on breathing new life into a great instrument."

15. Rickenbacker 2060 El Dorado

- Complete restoration including Re Finish, Re Fret, new gold hardware.

LowDown Basses #004

Here are the finished shots of LowDown Basses #004.  This bass is for sale! Email me @ Tslice4@yahoo.com if you are interested in purchasing it. Very affordable instrument! Hand rubbed oil finish on the neck. Quality bridge and tuners. And it weighs just under 7 lbs with no neck dive!
#003 is in the finishing stages right now.

LowDown Basses #004
"The Pawlonia P"
Lightweight Pawlonia wood body/Vintage Ivory finish/White-Black-White pickguard
Maple neck(subtle birdseye)/Rosewood Fretboard
Seymour Duncan SPB-2 P pickup/Passive/CTS Pots/White pickup covers
BadAss II bridge/Hipshot Ultralite Tuners
Strung with LaBella Deep Talkin' Flatwound strings

You can see parts of this bass build and #003 here
http://www.talkbass.com/threads/2nd-build-the-nostalgia-bass.1030067/

Rachel's Yamaha 5 String

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

Donnie's Gibson Grabber

Up next thru The LowDown Repair shop is a real cool, vintage bass.  The Gibson Grabber is a very unique instrument that I had never played and was real excited to check out.  This one came from a multi instrumentalist/band director buddie of mine Donnie.  He wanted to swap out the stock bridge for something nicer and the bass also needed a new set of strings and some general TLC.  Normally, I would advise against replacing stock hardware on a collectible, vintage piece of gear like this, but since the bridge cover was already missing I figured it wouldn't affect the potential re sale of this instrument anyways.  Plus, Donnie assured me he had no interest in selling this thing in the near future anyways. Other than the bridge swap I asked if he wanted anything else done.  He preferred the feel and sound of the worn frets and the vintage mojo all over the bass.  The Grabber features a pickup that is mounted to a piece of plastic that is moveable to get different pickup locations on the fly. Donnie had recently repaired the broken sliding piece so I knew that it was good to go.  So really my job was just to make it feel as good as possible without changing much other than the bridge.
I started by taking off the 3 strings that were on the bass and the stock bridge.

This thing was pretty dirty so i went about cleaning it.  The normal finish cleaner I use was a little harsh for the worn finish so I used rubbing alcohol and a lot of elbow grease. Then I followed it up with some Howards Feed N Wax to polish things up.  Then I pretty much took the same approach with the fretboard and hit the neck with the usual scotchbrite/Howards combo.  Then I took off the pickguard and pickup combo and noticed the bridge ground was not attached. Moved all that stuff off to the side and started on bridge placement.
We decided to go with a BadAss II bridge because of it's good reputation, look and solid overall build quality.  Unfortunately this would mean this bass would not have the string thru body option anymore but the ferrules and the general area of where the strings were passing thru the back of the body was a mess on the bass, so better to just bypass it all together.  I taped of the general area and measured out the proper placement.

I ended up nudging it toward the headstock a bit because I wanted it cover up as many of the original bridge holes as possible. The original calculated 34" scale placement put it a little farther back than ideal for visual reasons, but the BadAss bridge has such long intonation screws that it allows for a little more leeway than normal. Here it is with the new bridge installed and ready to go and with the pickguard and pickup re installed and bridge ground re soldered.  Also was missing a pickguard screw so I threw one on.

The other main issue was the butt end strap button was stripped out.  When I took it off  I saw that the damage was pretty bad. It looked like someone had tried some kind of putty to fill it before so I had to strait by cleaning everything out .

Then I plugged it with a dowel and tried re drilling.  Unfortunately, the plug didn't hold and tore out.  The area was just too much off a mess.  So I re plugged it once again and decided to redrill the hole into the original body wood slightly off center from the original strap button hole.  I did that and reinstalled the button and it worked great.  Wasn't too noticeable that it was off and was solid.

Then I got the bass re strung with some nice D'Addario nickels. The neck had a TON of back bow so I took the truss rod cover off and started adjusting.  Got it nice and dialed in and finished the rest of the setup. Plugged it in and everything sounded great and was playing smooth. Tightened up the rest of the hardware and The Grabber was ready to go!

13.  Donnie's Gibson Grabber
- Swapped stock bridge with BadAss II
- Plugged stripped strap button hole and reinstalled strap button
- Re soldered detached bridge ground wire
- Setup, re string, cleaned and tightened hardware

Saam's Electric, Acoustic and Amp

Next up are some repairs for Saam Hagshenas of the band Hey Champ. In the past I repaired a Fender P bass for the band's recording studio.  This time it was a couple of Saam's guitars.
First was a well worn Fender Bullet guitar. This thing definitely is naturally relic'ed and it needed a little love.  The main issue was the electronics were not working correctly.  After playing it plugged in for a couple minutes I knew it was the jack. Sure enough, opened here up and found the output jack ground wire was detached.

Soldered it back on and double check all the wiring.  Before I attached the pickguard and harness back I decided to make my life easier by opening up the truss rod access channel.  I could tell someone had already tried this but didn't follow thru.  The pickguard already had a small ugly cut out near the truss access. 

Then cleaned up the pickguard area

Got everything reattached and gave it a thorough cleaning and setup.

Next came an acoustic Fender that was having some fret problems.  I found some high frets and went to work with my fret file.  Brought the guitar into my friend Carl Pedigo and had him double check the work. He touched things up and I crowned and polished the frets.  Unfortunately I took a little too much fret off the 2nd fret, low E string side.  So I am waiting on some tools to pull that fret out and re fret it.

In the process of taking the strings out the G string snapped on me. Also, two of the bridge pins were broken.  I had to poke one of the out thru the body and in the process found a nicely worn guitar pick. 

So I replaced the broken bridge pins and re strung this baby up and gave it a setup. Plays way better with the exception of that low F#.

I am also happy to announce that I am now working in conjunction with Wilson Electronics Repair. https://www.facebook.com/wilsonelectronicsrepair

We had our first collaboration with Saam's old Gibson GA15 amplifier.  Jacob diagnosed the problem and fixed it quickly. It turned out to be a bad power switch. I am looking forward to working with Jacob. He will be handling any amp, keyboard, pedals, or electronics repairs that come thru the shop.

12.  Saam's guitars and amp

- Re soldered output jack ground, opened up truss rod access, setup, cleaned, tightened hardware on Fender bullet

- Fret level, replaced broken bridge pins, setup w/re string.

- Gibson GA15 amp switch repaired by Wilson Electronics Repair.