Bass Repairs

Several months ago, I bought a used Ibanez SR505 5-string bass. It's an older model but still pretty nice with a glossy natural wood finish. I replaced the strings and Tako helped me lower the action and fix the intonation. However, the input jack was a bit loose and caused occasional loud pops onstage. Since I just bought a nice bass amp head to complete my rig, I found a guitar repair shop and bought a replacement jack ($9). The concept is pretty simple: open the cover at the back of the bass, unsolder the old jack, remove it, screw in the new jack, solder the three connections, and replace cover. In real life, it took me about 20 minutes since I'm not very good with soldering, even after spending six years in engineering school.


I do have a pretty nice soldering iron (HAKKO Dash) that's made in Japan plus a huge roll of lead solder


That's a lot of electronics for a couple of bass pickups


All fixed... I can use my $40 Monster Cable now :)

From the last picture, you can see my "new" SWR 350X amp inside a road case. I used to carry my Carvin DCM1000 power amp in there. Now the Carvin amp is driving my old Infinity RS 3000 speakers in the bedroom. I need to be careful since the speakers are only rated at 100W and the Carvin puts out ~300W per channel at six ohms. Right now I have my Mac mini's audio output going to a small Tapco mixer (preamp) which is plugged into the amp. Now I can send my iTunes signal to both stereo systems. The Yamaha AV-700 amp in the living room is connected to a pair of Infinity Reference Three speakers and I can stream music to it with my wireless network.