The Last Bass Outpost

So, I've got this guitar (yes, a guitar... not a bass... I have sinned) which I love except I'm not satisfied with the bridge pickup sound.
It's a really odd shaped pickup. It's a Danelectro 59xt with a "dual lipstick" humbucker in the bridge.
Nothing else is quite the same size ...

I had the inspiration that I could have a custom pickup ring 3D-printed and try out some other pickups if I can find something that's small enough for the route, and avoid having to route the guitar.
A little measurement proved that either a Filtertron style pickup, or a P90, or a mini-humbucker should fit, given the right mounting ring.  I went ahead and ordered a Filtertron from TV Jones, and designed and printed a pickup ring. Everything seemed to fit and I was excited to install it ... tried putting the strings on and...

Crap. I forgot to measure the depth. The strings are touching the pickup!
The existing route shape is wide enough, but not deep enough. Looks like I need to go maybe 3 or 4mm deeper.

So, I need to either give up, or, make the route deeper.
I've never tried making a route deeper... I don't have any suitable tools... since I'm going to have to buy some tools if I want to proceed, what should I look at?
I don't have a workshop, just my bedroom, so it needs to be somethign I can just put away in the closet. No drill press here.
Can this be done by hand with a sharp chisel?
Dremel?
Plunge router? I don't have a template for this pickup nor how to make one ...

I'm ok with it not looking cosmetically great, since it won't be visible under the pickup and mounting ring.

This is not what I was doing on my 12th birthday, but I wish it was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaeNz2Kkqaw

I've heard some great kids who can really play, but what's striking to me is the level of consistency and how rock solid her time is. It usually takes decades to get there. I'm still not there!


Ian Paice himself gave a nod to her solo drum-along from a few months previous:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4CggE5nAQk

Hey folks. I did wrong.

Carlo - I've sent you an email, but wanted to apologize to you in public here, where I learned of your work.

I work as a programmer at Shopify, since two years ago when my previous employer was acquired by them.
As part of training, we each had to set up a test shopify store to kick the tires on. "Hey, I'll make a bass store!" I thought.
I love the look of your designs, so I took some of his photos and added them to my store, along with my favorite brand of strings, and wrote some copy about fine handmade instruments from Cataldo.

I made several thoughtless offenses:
I didn't ask permission to use your name, brand, or photos.
I didn't make it clear it was a test site, it looked real enough.
And I must have flipped the switch that made the store public.
I don't think my own name appeared anywhere, so it wasn't even clear who was responsible for this.
And then I just forgot about it all for nearly two years.

Until today when I got your (more polite than necessary) email, I presume via the site contact form, asking why your basses were on my website.

Carlo, again, I'm sorry. Your basses are beautiful. I've admired them for years. If I was a luthier and saw my work for sale on some random site I'd never heard of, I'd be very upset for sure.
I'm sorry. I should never have used your work like that.
My intentions were just to have some fun while learning how to set up the shop.
As I said by email I have already shut the site down.

Note for the bass outpost:
I want to say also that Carlo did not ask me to write this. I did so because I value this forum and Carlo's contributions to it and felt that this was the appropriate place to admit my errors in public.

I thought this was pretty cool:
https://youtu.be/a59hpDjszH4

How does one glue veneer that's splitting like this?  Krazy glue did nothing and is all I had in the house, will have to order something but don't know what.

Also don't know how I would clamp such a thing ... would have to buy clamps too and no idea what would work on a curve like this...

Really good show at the Mercury Lounge in NYC -  aside from an unusually large crowd of extremely tall dudes... I am 6' tall (that's 183 cm to most of the world) and never had so much trouble seeing the stage in my life... Oh, and a couple of really obnoxious people loudly fake-laughing and talking their heads off during the few really quiet numbers; they managed to anger not only the entire crowd but the performers too.

Anyway, the band was great and the bass sound was quite good. Powerful and had more clarity in the lows than last few times I saw Watt, which would have been when he was playing one of his much-modified EB-0 or EB-3 basses, and I don't remember what amp rig at the time. For a long time, I found his live tone merely loud and murky and much prefered his tone on recordings.
Of course with so many variables, I can't be sure what to attribute the improvement to - could be the bass, could be the new DNA / Barefaced rig, could be the PA and engineer at the Mercury Lounge, which seem to be pretty good - the whole band sounded great. Could be all three!

Anyway, at some point I briefly got a good look at the bass and was surprised it did not look like a stock Reverend Wattplower which he's been mostly playing on recent tours.  This one was a yellow Wattplower but had a very odd pickup arrangement, with what looked like a P pickup with two halves for the lower strings - very strange.
Then I saw this, from a few days previous on Watt's twitter feed - this is surely the same bass:


Looks like it has a neck pickup too? Wonder what that is.

My first thought was: Of course, the guy who endlessly hacked up and modified his old Gibsons can't stop doing the same with his own signature model

Then I saw this on his homepage - maybe an earlier stage of the same bass? It's missing the pickguard and has different controls:


And this description:

2018 reverend guitars "wattplower" bass
mark II prototype
design is a total joe naylor/mike watt collaboration
short scale neck, twentyone frets
passive volume/tone controls
joe naylor designed "p-blade" pickup
hipshot 'a style' bridge w/solid brass spacer
strings are loaded through the body
hipshot 'ultralite' tuners
this protoype includes mark I pickup mode
(low strings coil closer to the neck on)
+ mark II mode (low strings coil closer
to the bridge on) selected via
push/pull switch combo tone control
(the high strings coil is always on)

Interesting, wonder if they will ever put this model up for sale and likely replace the existing Wattplower.
I guess either enough of these have sold that Reverend thinks it's worth their time, or maybe they just enjoy constant tinkering along with Watt!

https://reverb.com/item/25770266-1971-gibson-sb-300-highly-modified-players-bass-walnut

Price seems stupidly high to me given it's been routed so much and doesn't come with original pickups or bridge.
But I bet it plays nice and probably has at least one good sound

What the hell do all the switches do though?
And where did all the logos go?

There's an exhibit up now called "Play it Loud". Exhibiting mostly famous instruments from the past 60 years of popular music.  The cool thing is that you can see them from inches away (behind glass).   Very heavy on guitars of course, but there was a bass section and I thought some of you might like to see a few familiar Ox axes...
I'll post more later but for starters here's a Quadrophenia-era bird, supposedly one that gigged a fair amount.