Reviving this thread - I was going to do the spring removal mod on my Ibanez EHB as I hate the locking sockets. As I'm wireless 95% of the time, all they are is an annoyance. However, when I extracted the socket from the bass, I found that the locking mechanism wasn't secured by a screw but some sort of rivet - not Torx, not hex, not crosshead. So, given that drilling the rivet out is by no means guaranteed to be a solution as I don't know if the innards could then be re-secured, I went in search of the D-type plates. It turns out that blanking plate, or possibly XLR blanking plate, is the optimum thing to search for - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/324489814445 . So I just need a stereo jack socket (can't find one so that's another thing to order) and to drill a 10mm (I think) hole in the plate when it arrives.