Grangur

Strange, but I too have been looking at it and thinking something didn't ring true. The strings are central to the pups, neck and wood lines. So, of the 3 screws, the centre one is correct. Measuring the space from the bridge to each side of the 1st pickup, which I think is pretty true to the line, there's a 2mm difference from one side to the other. The E string side is 15mm. The G string side is 17mm. If one was to fix it, I'd keep the centre screw as it is, fill the other 2 holes and re-drill them. This would, however, mean that 2 of the mounting screws have holes that may be slightly less secure than they were. The bass has given pleasure for 40 years. Yes, the bridge is slightly skewed, but does it affect the playability of it? Or the tone quality? I think I'd leave it as it is.

All soldering done, pots and knobs fitted. Both switches are as per the specifications by Leland Sklar, "DFA" functionality! Set up and ready for return. Strange as it may seem... The bridge saddles may be straight, but the intonation seems fine like this. This has been checked as far up as the 17th fret.

Today a pupil cried off with a sick wife he cares for. (I'm a driving instructor.) So I cracked on with some more routing and drilling of the pickup screw holes. For drilling the holes for the screws I used a pillar drill as this makes sure to get the holes put in vertically. A significant concern, when drilling is also to be certain that I'm not going to drill right through to the back. So I used a Vernier to measure the body to be 42mm thick and the pickup pocket to be 25mm. That leaves 17mm of wood available for the drill hole. I drilled the holes to be 10mm deep. I hate screwing the pickups in place. What really bugs me is the pathetically soft metal they make the screws from. I made a mistake of not drilling one of the holes deep enough and due to this the screwdriver, which isn't a great fit in the tiny screw head, chewed the life out of the cross-head of the screw. So I fitted another screw. After fitting the pickups I've now re-fitted the bridge and strings. Then gave it a preliminary setup, so the neck is back under tension. Next stage is to solder the electrics. Then intonation and the final setup. The white stuff you can see is where I did have 2 sided tape holding foam in place for the pickups. In the final assembly I've now used springs.

Today I finished the routing... I need to dig out a very small drill for the screw holes. Didn't want to rush that.

I'm not aware of one. Yet as a woodturner, I'm used to keeping masks and dust extraction gear.

The latest update is I ordered a template for routing the pickup cavities to suit the MM style humbuckers. Mick ordered the Wikinson WSME4 pickups. They were delivered to me and the work has begun. There really isn't much wood to remove, but it's still slow work with a Dremel and the small router attachment and small router bits. Initially I thought it's burning more than cutting. The truth is the cut away wood is that fine it's like smoke. Definitely a situation for wearing a mask to protect the lungs. I don't know what the wood is, but some exotic woods can be killers in the lungs. The inserts cut need to be cut deeper. But this is as far as the Dremel router bit will reach. The next stage will be cut without the template in place.

Nice rundown @lemmywinks Also, I've never seen any Warwick, of any description, with a string tree/retainer thingy. Something odd there.

The pickups are out of the bass and sent Special Delivery to Martin. With any luck they will be there soon. Checking the neck pickup, before sending: When connecting the pup to the socket directly, the pup seemed to work on the G and D, but not the E and A. That was odd.

To be honest, I'm not too surprised. That bass looks great. I love the woods and the through-neck. The pickups are disappointing. They lack any real meat in the sound. @LukeFRCmay have a point in the possibility they could be argued to sound "vintage". I'm pretty sure there were some vintage pups that had more of a drive than those. Also. when putting it together I first built it with a complete passive circuit. It sounded thin and very average. I then put in the G201 circuit... and to my ears it makes no difference at all whatsoever. So the purpose of that circuit is still lost on me. As Mick says, I think the search for some meat for that bass needs to continue.

The pots we have here have a splined spindle, but I guess it's possible to use a grub-screw if the diametre of the hole in the splied bush is right for the spindle. Many thanks. That said, I don't know if @TheGreek wants wooden knobs. Maybe I should make sure he actually likes the bass first? Maybe, if he doesn't like the bass, wooden knobs would make it more saleable in any case?

Thank you. The idea of wood controls is an Interesting thought. I'd be happy to turn them. What I'm not so sure of is fitting them to the pots.

The bass has been moving on slowly. The electrics has been completed. Then today I got out to the lathe and turned some wooden buttons to fit into the holes. I didn't want to glue them as you never know if someone will later be able to refit the original circuit. So these were made as a tight push-fit into the holes. This is the natural colour of the wood. I hand sanded the stems to get a tight fit. All I need to do now is find a way to get it back to Mick.

Me too. I've had my Antex since the late 70s. I guess we see those as being great for lasting so long. If you're selling soldering irons, I guess they'd see it as a mistake that they lasted this long after we paid so little for them.

OK, so all connected and I plug!ged if in.... The bridge pickup works for the Series/parallel. Not working for having 1 of the coils being live on its own. The neck pickup works on 1 coil only. A quick glance in the back and I found the red core from the pickup cable has come away from the toggle switch!!! Aaggghhh!! I could do without this. To get access to reterminate the red core, I need to unsolder some parts. What I'm not going to do is inflict the Draper heap of garbage on anything more. So, I ordered another iron. This time it's back to having an Antex soldering iron. What bugs me is the single core not working. Think I'll investigate this further. I need to disconnect the cores, test the switch and think through the logic of the switching the circuit. Must do this, before ordering anything more: Like I need to find out if the switches work as I would expect.

Over the last few days I've been working on the circuit. The bass looks much better now with the pots fitted to the body. I've also wired the new cables from the pups to the switches. This was really fiddly work with the very fine core cables that needed baring and soldering using the wiring I worked out from the MEC2 circuit from the Warwick $$. With the old soldering iron having packed up I bought a replacement. Nothing special but something I thought would "do the job". The old one was 25w. I read something saying, get a more powerful one for better results. I bought a Draper 60w iron. What a complete load of bologna that turned out to be! Totally useless heap of junk! The tip has burned out already! I didn't expect much, but it was less than not much. Anyway, somehow I plodded on and just about got through. All connected just as a passive bass. My thinking was to check out the core switches before I get the G201 into the circuit.

Thankyou, but things could have been a load worse. It'll be fine.

Day 2 of getting down to fixing up the Kawai bass. I got down my Warwick $$ and checked out the pickup coil switching. It is, as I remembered: series/parallel/single coil. So I worked out the wiring connections to the switches. Then I set to work to change the wiring to the new pickups to separate the coils. Then to install them in the bass. The first disappointment: the nice new chrome mounting screws with springs are exactly that: screws. The bass has captive nut inserts in the body. Furthermore the springs would be too long. So I found the old black bolts and some good squidgy foam to fit in the cavities. The holes for the bolts aren't a great alignment with the captive inserts, but with a bit of jiggling around, I managed to fit the pickups. After this I've started to connect the new 4-core pickup wires to the first switch. I'll post more pictures of these when they are both connected.

In the things Mick supplied, is a circuit diagram. This contains 2 tone controls and a 3-way toggle switch for pickup selection. The circuit here is, in effect, a 2 pickup passive circuit, fed into the G201. In my experience, in circuits like this I've always found the 2 tone controls don't work as we want them to work. While we think in terms of 1 tone control adjusts the tone of each pickup, the electronic circuit doesn't "think" like this. Granted, if the toggle has just 1 pup connection you're in a good place. When you have 2 pups connected, what you actually have is 2 tone controls controlling the tone of whatever pickup(s) are in the circuit. For this reason I'm more inclined towards having a well tried and successful VVT circuit. The volume for each pickup can be dialed in and 1 tone control for both pickups. Besides, when are you likely to have full bass on pickup 1 and treble on pickup 2 while BOTH are switched in?

In addition to the pickups, Mick has supplied the bass with a new G201 circuit which is powered by a battery. The general idea for wiring the pups to the coil switching, then to the volume for each, the tone control and the output then fed to the G201. To get started I ordered new pots, tone capacitor and cable. Then I waited... and waited... The pots and cable arrived through the postal strike. Then I started taking the electrical components out. Then it happened! My soldering iron that has served me faithfully for 40+ years gave up!! Why now?! So I ordered a new soldering iron. Soldering iron arrived, by which time I have managed to pull some ligaments in my back.... oh deep joy. This is going to be fun.

To resolve the problem with the lost pickup, Mick has gone to Martin Herrick of Herrick Pickups to get custom made pups made. https://www.herrickpickups.com/ We have the pickups and I'm sure they will work fine. They do, however lack the pre-amp circuit that was in originals. So what we have now are passive pups. Not only are they passive, but they're wired with the 2 coils wired in series. In the original bass the coils were connected to a 3-way switch. This, I'm guessing would be to switch the coils into series, parallel and something else. This could be "off". But why do this? We have a volume control for that. I have an idea for this. The bass has 2 humbuckers. What would seem sensible would be to do, what I think is on the Warwick $$ basses: Series, Parallel and 1 coil. When using the single coil, this would be connected so the bass becomes, in effect a jazz bass. So it would use the coils nearest to bridge and nearest the neck. I need to sort out how to wire the switch for this.

Mick had the bass working originally. He loved the tone, but the bridge pickup was more quiet than the neck pup. The original pickups in the bass are a little different to normal pickups. They each contain a pre-amp circuit, with connections out to allow for the connection to a volume and tone control to each pickup. All this circuitry is then potted into a black resin to protect the circuit, both from damage, but also from people wanting to know how this circuit works. Mick tells me bass was, sent to someone who investigated this and in doing so, they attacked the original pickup with a Dremel to investigate the connections. Sadly this has left the bridge pickup circuit with no connections and nothing much now to allow us to know where each of the cable connections should go!

This is a bass owned by @TheGreek Its a Kawai Alembic copy from the 1980s. This is, I suspect, from the Matsomoku factory on Japan. Certainly its well made and the headstock is the right shape for one of theirs. Mick came to me with this, asking if I had seen his thread on here discussing new pickups and electrics for this bass. I hadn't. In the past 3 years I've scarcely picked up a bass, let alone fixed one. Work has me pretty busy, but I've taken this on because it's a beauty of bass. I'd like to have if working and playable. Plus I need to stop working 7-days a week.

Most bass necks can take a few fret levels before they come to need a re-fret. I've seen a Fender neck that was leveled down to the frets having very little height. My guess is the person who did it didn't do a particularly good job. If I were you I'd ask @gary mac He's a great guy and would be happy to do you a good job at a sensible rate. Not sure where "green hill zone" is, but I guess its near Hertfordshire 😜

The tonal range that this bass has a reputation for, and you're wanting to re-build, will have been be created by the original pickups with their integral pre-amps and the specialisd control switching circuit in the bass. Regrettably, one of the original pickups has been, in the most part destroyed. This has destroyed the option of having the orginal tone of the bass where the bridge pickup is concerned. I have no doubt the new pickups are straight-forward and easy to install into a conventional circuit, found in most bass guitars. The circuit in the bass is NOT a conventional circuit. What I also know is the new pickups don't have integral pre-amps found in the old Kawai pups. Whatever pre-amp you choose to have installed won't be identical to the pre-amp that's in the orignal pups, so the sound won't be the same as original. Your circuit wiring diagram shows the wires to the pups as being green, yellow, white, brown and earth. What the pickups actually have are brown, white and earth. So the wiring to the switches as shown in the diagram isn't possible without changing the cables and connections to the pickups. Mick, your bass is of excellent construction. Its a solid through-neck beauty and I'm sure it will be a nice bass. It's possible the bass could be wired to be "as original" in respect of the neck pickup; if that one pup, and the related circuit works. What it will never be is the same as it originally was in respect to the bridge pup. Sorry, Mick, but I'll be returning the bass to you as it is and wish you all the very best with it. As discussed, I'll be happy for you to come and collect the bass, or I can ship it at your cost.