Plugging a hole in Benjamin’s bass

I am a hobgoblin of consistency. I’ve been using the same bass amp since 1998 (a prototype Mesa/Boogie Bass Triaxis and Strategy 500 power amp), and haven’t even changed my core settings in decades. I’ve played fretless bass almost exclusively for about 25 years. I usually only own one or two basses at a time, and usually hold on to them for 10 years or more before I move on to something else. I don’t usually have controls on my instruments: no volume knob, no tone knob, no active preamp. Although I wouldn’t consider my particular type of consistency foolish (as Ralph Waldo Emerson might presume), it has recently led me down another path of even greater simplification.

For the past several years I have been playing a Warmoth Z bass I put together. My old Ovation Magnums that I had been playing for 10 years were great, but as I’m aging I’m having to take stock of how heavy instruments are wreaking havoc on my back. Since I have a genetic spinal defect, playing heavy instruments was taking too much of a toll, and I set out to put together the lightest instrument I could. I picked out a super light ash body, routed it myself for a J/P/J setup, painted it, and put super light Hipshot tuners and bridge on it, and the entire thing ended up weighing only six pounds. Since I had three pickups in it, I wired it up to a simple four way blade switch (Jazz, Precision, all three, and off). Over the years, I had gravitated to using just one sound: all three pickups on, all the time. (If you haven’t followed it’s slow wiring evolution on our Facebook and Instagram feeds, it’s set up as two Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounder Jazz pickups (wired in series), half a Quarter Pounder P-bass and half a Hot P-Bass functioning as a Precision pickup (wired in series), with both sets wired in parallel to each other.) Since I was only using one sound all the time, I figured it was high time to commit to it permanently.

Originally I wired it to the four way switch, and now I wanted to convert it to a single on/off switch. The switch would engage all three pickups in the above configuration in the on position, and then shunt everything to ground in the off position. In order to do this, I would have to remove the switch, route out the existing route, plug it, and then drill a new hole for the new simpler switch. Since I was battling a bout of insomnia over the weekend, I figured I might as well make myself usefull, so I ended up in the shop at 4am working on this project. Here’s what my groggy head got myself into:

Here’s the original setup, with the blade switch route:

I removed the bridge and one of the pickups to make room to work, and then mapped everything out. Since the route below the top was much larger than just the blade access, I had to make a wider route so that the new plug would be full depth and make good contact with the body wood. I had a pre-existing router template that was the perfect size, so I didn’t have to make any tooling – which is great, since it was 4am and I was running on only 3 hours of sleep!

We use a small Festool router for most of these kind of jobs, which is practically fool-proof when used in conjunction with a router template and brass inserts. My long-standing practice of measuring thrice and cutting once has once again served me well: my route was mapped out perfectly, and my cut came out great!

Now, if this were a customer’s instrument, most likely I would have used the same type of wood to create the plug, in this case swamp ash. It would be grain matched and painted to practically disappear, but since this was my bass, I wanted to do something a little different and use ebony, which matches my fingerboard. Plus, I didn’t really feel like painting, as this thing is wearing in quite nicely and I didn’t want to undo it’s natural aging.

This was the most time consuming part: shaping a plug to fit perfectly. Every single side and curve has to be absolutely dead on. I rough cut out a piece of ebony, with the grain line in the same direction as my fingerboard, and then slowly sanded it down to the exact shape as the route:

Once the shape was correct, just a bit of a gentle push and some glue, and… huzzah! A perfect fit!

I let the glue sit for a day, and since I woke up super early (AGAIN!) the next day, I went in to finish it up the following morning. First, I put a little bit of black dye on the ebony, to help it match the darker ebony of my fingerboard:

Then I once again carefully mapped out where I wanted my new switch to be, which was just below and in the dead center of my bridge (which was also dead center of the ebony plug). A quick trip to the drill press and presto! A perfect hole.

Now the easy part: installing my kill switch and wiring it up. This works simply as an on/off switch: towards the neck allows signal to flow, away from the neck shunts everything to ground.

I’m quite pleased with my late night/early morning insomnia project. It looks cool, feels super solid, and eliminates complexity that I wasn’t really using anyway. I dig it!

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Clare Boothe Luce