Restoring a Schecter Japan Jazz Bass

[umcoo]

Hi all,

I've recently restored an old Schecter Jazz, and thought it may be useful or interesting to share the experience for others who were wanting to do similar.

From the start, I think it's worth pointing out I'm in no way skilled with things such as this, and most parts were trial and error. The project is now complete, and I'm really pleased with the end result, so it shows that a relative novice can still do this with some success!

So anyway, I've become somewhat obsessed with old Schecter USA custom shop things, and especially their Monstertone pickups. They were recently reissued, however I'm always on the lookout for an old set. In the rare cases where old Schecter USA basses become available, they sell for too high a price and are almost non-existent the UK. Following a recent trip to Japan, I discovered that the 'Schecter Japan' brand had produced similar style basses. Information about them is quite thin on the ground. They used quality hardware and materials, and are available at a much more reasonable cost. I'm unsure of production dates for these "JB basses" - I'm guessing late 80's/90's. Most importantly for me though, was that they come with the Monstertone pickups.

A very used bass turned up in Japan, which I bought. I don't remember the cost, but I think it was around £300, plus import costs to the UK. My initial plan was to steal the pickups and sell the bass on cheap so I got something back for it. Here is the bass in the auction;







As you can see, not great condition, but I figured it was worth a punt.

When the bass arrived, it came with old rusted strings and needed a good clean. Pickups made a noise though and it has a great neck with low action and frets in great condition. Unfortunately, I neglected to get any pictures of the bass once it arrived and started to dismantle it shortly after.

My new plan was to strip and refinish it. I'd always been keen to try and do a spray can nitro finish, and the bass seemed a good candidate. But first, I needed to get the thick black poly off...

[umcoo]

Once the hardware and neck were off, I set about removing the finish. I initially tried a paint stripper, which made zero impact. Not a bubble. I had seen a few examples where heat guns had been used, so I gave that a try...well, I borrowed my wife's hair dryer when she was away one weekend. Surprisingly, this worked! I kept the dryer moving steadily over the body and used a scraper to loosen the paint around a ding. The paint on the front and back came off rather easily. I'd say it took me an hour or so to do both sides. As you can see, under the paint was a yellow sealer coat. Heat didn't touch this! More on this later...

The body stripped of hardware and before any work.


Getting there with my hair dryer!


Note the yellow sealer coat


The pile of paint after being removed


I ran into issues when the hair dryer wasn't as good at removing the paint from the edges and inside the horns. For this, I actually upgraded to a real heat gun and left the wife's hair dryer for its usual purpose! I had some success but it took a lot longer and left smaller chips of paint still on the body which were a pain to remove. I bought a hand sander, stuck some 100 grit to it and just went at it. And this worked a treat! It went right through the sealer coat and I had an attachment which let me get into the horns easier too. The whole body was paint free and sealer free and sanded to 100 grit in about half an hour. I don't think the sanding would have been as quick had I not removed the larger pieces of paint, but I was happy with the end result. I then sanded with 240, then 320 and it was nice and smooth.

[JapanAxe]

Subscribed!

[umcoo]

Once sanded to 320 grit, I filled in a couple of dings with wood filler. Left them to dry overnight and sanded smooth. There wasn't a huge amount of grain on the wood, and there were no obvious pores. I'm guessing it's alder which is used. This was important as if it was a porous wood such as ash, I would have needed to grain fill before I could move onto the sealer. As it was though, no grain filler was needed.

I needed to wait til payday, but ordered my paint from a few places. I had some sealer and primer from Manchester Guitar Tech, some colour from North West Guitars and picked up a couple of cans of clear gloss from Morrells (For anyone in the UK looking to spray with nitro, Morrells only do the clear coats in gloss/matt/satin, but they're cheaper than a lot of other places. Around £9 a can if I remember right).

So, first step was sealer. This gives a flat base to lay on the primer and colour coats. It also fills in small defects in the wood. Armed with a respirator (safety first, kids) and a block of wood in the neck pocket to hold it from, I started spraying. I didn't do a huge amount of coats, just enough to cover the body. Maybe 3 coats in total. The wood changes colour quite significantly when the sealer goes on. I also used the sealer stage as a good practice for my spraying technique for later coats.

Here's the body after the second sealer coat.




At this stage, the body was quite smooth, but had a couple of rough patches. I left it to dry over night, making sure not to lean it against anything, and then wet sanded it all over with 400 grit the following day. Not much pressure is used, just enough to keep the block sliding along. It's vital to use a block on the front and back to not create any ridges with your fingers. The sides, inside the horns, and the contours were wet sanded by hand - just a gentle pressure to remove the rough spots. Most guidance about the sealer stage says how it's importantto make sure the sealer is really flat and all the shiny spots are removed when wet sanding. I just made sure everything was smooth with the 400 and carried on from there. I could have spent more time on this and made sure it was perfect, and perhaps I was lucky, but I didn't really sweat this stage.

Next up, primer and colour!

[umcoo]

After sanding the sealer with 400 grit, I moved on to primer coats, colour and clear. I only used enough primer and colour so that the body was covered, as I wanted to keep the finish relatively thin.

Primer went on easy enough and about 2 or 3 coats were all that were needed to get full coverage.





I didn't sand the body at all during this stage. As I'm sure you know, nitro melts into itself so there was no need to. Once I had the primer covering the body, I began colour coats. I knew I wanted one of the Fender custom colours and something a little out of the ordinary, but it would also need to look good with the gold hardware the bass came with. So I went for....Shell Pink! As soon as I started spraying the first coat, I knew I'd made the right decision. It's really hard to get an accurate picture of it, but it looks to me like strawberry milkshake. 60's Fender goodness!

Here's the body during one of the coats. It doesn't actually look this dark at all. This was taken in the evening, but you get the idea.


I used about 3/4 of the spray can, which gave me full coverage and enough left if I sanded through later on in the process. Again, I didn't sand the body at all during this.

Next step was clear. I had 2 cans of clear and pretty much used them all. I sprayed my coats quite wet and waited around 20/30 mins between each coat. I was mostly doing this on evenings after work, so after about 3 coats, the light was fading and I hung it up for the night. One thing to note was that I had quite a few bits of dust or insects fly into the finish when I did the clear. This didn't happen at all with the primer or colour, but there was a point I needed to sand some blemish out after every few coats. I wet sanded the areas gently and in a small circle with 600 grit. As soon as the blemish was gone, I'd stop. After a while, I learnt to live with them and only removed the more obvious issues. 99% of them were removed in the final sanding anyway, so no need to worry.

After the 2nd can of clear, I hung the body up to cure. In total, I left it about 4 weeks. Some sources say it can be sanded and polished before then, but as this was my first attempt, I wanted to err on the side of caution. Next stage is sanding and polishing!

[umcoo]

I must admit, I was slightly apprehensive about the wetsanding process. After the cost and time to paint the body, as well as the 4 week wait for it to cure, I was a little nervous about going at it with some wet and dry paper! The aim of wetsanding is to get the paint completely flat so it can be polished and buffed to a mirror shine. I didn't have a great amount of orange peel, so I began wetsanding with 1000 grit. It was clear though that this would take some time. I moved down to 800 grit and began to see quicker results. The first pass with the 800 took the longest as I tried to remove all the shiny spots on the finish. I removed about 99% of shiny spots with the 800, and also had a tiny sand-through. It was right by the neck pickup route and goes through to the primer and sealer. At first, I was gutted, but it's really hard to spot unless you're looking for it, and now the bass is strung up with pickups installed, I forget it's there.

After the 800 grit, I used 1000, 1200 and finally 1500 grit. Here's the body after the 1500 grit sanding, as well as the sand-through.





I left the body overnight, then started the polishing. As I don't have a buffing wheel, I just did it by hand with a rag, then wiped off with a microfibre cloth. I initially used T-Cut which gave surprisingly good results, however I had a few swirls and scratches still left. I got some Meguirs Scratch X from Halfords which I used over the T-Cut and that seemed to do a better job. Glad I used both though. At this point, the body is finished. I was surprised how good it looked, especially considering this was my first attempt and it was done with spray cans. I test fitted the neck that evening to get my first impressions of them both together.





Final job now was to clean up the hardware and get it playing again!

[umcoo]

So the final stage was to get the hardware cleaned up and installed. As the hardware is gold plated, I didn't want to scrub it clean as it would remove the plating, plus I quite liked the aged patina and it goes well with the age and style of the bass. I just used some foam cleaner on the tuners, bridge and neck plate.



One of the original knobs had been changed before I bought the bass, so I tried to track down another. The closest I found was a Gotoh VK-3, same style and colour. I think the knobs would have originally been brass, and this has aged quite a lot over the years. I'm currently looking at how to age the newest knob so it fits in with the rest, but it does its job fine just now. Any tips though would be appreciated!



The wiring and pots were knackered when I got the bass, so I bought new Bourns 250k pots, and a push/pull pot for the tone position. I wired the bass up for series/parallel, as I prefer the series mode for a thicker and punchier tone. It's nice to have both options though if I wanted to go back to a classic Jazz tone. Finished up with cloth wiring and a Switchcraft jack. I managed to salvage the original capacitor which is a Fujicon .022, so it has quite a dark tone.

The pickups needed a good clean and the pole pieces were rusty so I tried to remove as much of that as possible. I installed the pickups and the wiring, and tapped the pieces with a screwdriver whilst it was amplified to make sure everything was as it should be. Surprisingly, it was! Neck was fitted and I strung it up with D'Addario 105-50 roundwounds.



And that's it complete. It's nice to save an old bass and give it a new lease of life, and it's getting all of my playing time currently, so it can't be that bad!

Here it is with it's older brother.




Cheers all

[JapanAxe]

Splendid job!

[umcoo]

Thanks Japanaxe!

[LukeFRC]

Looks amazing - I hear good things about those old schechter pickups too

[alittlebitrobot]

Now there's a surprise! When I saw the first photo of the pink, I was (to be honest) repulsed but it turned out great! Very nice.

[ahpook]

Wow, what a lovely job - beautiful finish.

You could try some hot vinegar vapour to age the knob - take some white vinegar in a shallow microwave-friendly container that has a lid (I've used a plastic take-out box) and heat it up in the microwave. Then put the knob on something that act like an island to keep it out of the vinegar itself, pop the top on and let the vapour work on your, er...knob. Ahem.

Edited October 10, 2017 by ahpook

[cheddatom]

very nice!

[umcoo]

Thanks all.

Alittlebitrobot - haha. That first picture isn't really representative at all of the colour. I'm glad you liked it in the end though!

Ahpook - That's great, thanks. I will try that. I had done similar but without heating the vinegar, so will report back my results!

[alittlebitrobot]

[quote name='umcoo' timestamp='1507650521' post='3386996'] Thanks all. Alittlebitrobot - haha. That first picture isn't really representative at all of the colour. I'm glad you liked it in the end though![/quote]

This is one of the things I love about this forum. I know what I love in instrument design but seeing things I thought I didn't like, and finding them convincing, changes my view on things. Change is good

[umcoo]

[quote name='alittlebitrobot' timestamp='1507657617' post='3387051']


This is one of the things I love about this forum. I know what I love in instrument design but seeing things I thought I didn't like, and finding them convincing, changes my view on things. Change is good
[/quote]

As the great Stephen Malkmus says, "change is all we need to improve"

[Rikki_Sixx]

This looks great, nice to see an old Schecter getting some love! That body looks extra-offset, is it slightly more pronounced than a Fender-style J? Love the colour, I'd never have thought to put it with gold but it looks awesome!

[Andyjr1515]

My ipad wouldn't download the pictures, so I've only just seen the result - and it's great!

Lovely job.

I think it's just as well that you didn't have a buffing wheel - the paint would have been far too soft after only an overnight cure. For buffing it is usually 2 weeks minimum for it to get hard enough.

Great result from the way you did it

[BassTool]

[quote name='umcoo' timestamp='1507476685' post='3385718']
After sanding the sealer with 400 grit, I moved on to primer coats, colour and clear. I only used enough primer and colour so that the body was covered, as I wanted to keep the finish relatively thin.

Primer went on easy enough and about 2 or 3 coats were all that were needed to get full coverage.





I didn't sand the body at all during this stage. As I'm sure you know, nitro melts into itself so there was no need to. Once I had the primer covering the body, I began colour coats. I knew I wanted one of the Fender custom colours and something a little out of the ordinary, but it would also need to look good with the gold hardware the bass came with. So I went for....Shell Pink! As soon as I started spraying the first coat, I knew I'd made the right decision. It's really hard to get an accurate picture of it, but it looks to me like strawberry milkshake. 60's Fender goodness!

Here's the body during one of the coats. It doesn't actually look this dark at all. This was taken in the evening, but you get the idea.



[/quote]

Good job umcoo being a bit of a keen gardener I like the way you matched the colour to your fuschias

Nice transformation

[umcoo]

Thanks all

Rikki_Sixx - I don't [i]think [/i]it's any different from a Fender. Maybe just camera angles? Yeah, I'm really pleased with the colour. I wanted to go with Capri Orange, but I think that plus the gold would have looked wrong.

Andy - thanks very much, I've been an admirer of your work so that means a lot. Didn't know that about the buffing, so glad I didn't buff the finish away after all that work

BassTool - cheers! I can't take credit as it's the wife who sorts the garden. I can't stand being out there myself maybe I've been subconsciously taking note of the pink though!

[roman_sub]

great job, the pink also won me over! now all you gotta do is play / gig it heavily for some natural relic'ing :-)

[umcoo]

Working on it!

[fleabag]

It would be advantageous to  post smaller file size photos - i'm on a good connection but they're taking way too long to load