This was a birthday present for myself!
I've been on the hunt for something with a mudbucker down at the end of the neck for a while. My 4003 and Starfire both have true neck pickups, but neither has a hot, punchy pickup in that spot. I was looking at basses to modify, when I stumbled up on this! Its red, SG-shaped and doesn't need any routing or hacking about.
I'd previously been checking out a used, and abused, longscale Epiphone EB-3, but I didn't like the block inlays or the visual impression of a small SG body on the end of a long neck. Plus, the neck angle wasn't quite right as the strings were tickling the bridge pickup, which was about as low as it would go in its trim ring.
From some Googling, it seems that Tokai make/made a few EB-3 copies. One was a bolt-on necked bass. One had a weirdly short pickguard. One had a wider knob spacing like an early EB-3. I'm not sure what model this is, but it has a set neck and the pickguard is almost the right shape. Unfortunately the pickguard isn't quite flat on the top of the bass, but I plan to cut another with a 30 degree bevel.
Just to clarify, this isn't an old 'lawsuit' instrument but something built in the last few years, most probably in China. I think it shares a lot of DNA with Epiphone EB-0 basses.
Headstock has a cheeky open-book shape and the tuners have nice small paddles, rather than the huge cloverleafs that make some EB-0/SG/EB-3 basses look a bit silly. I have some Wilkinson tuners of the same design if I need to upgrade.
The pickups are a mixed bag. The 'mudbucker' is similar to an Epiphone EB-0 pickup I had for a while. Specifically it measures 1.2 k ohms on the multimeter, as some Epiphone EB-0 pickups do. Tonally it is a dull pickup with low output but very little treble as well. I will probably replace this with an Artec sidewider.
The bridge pickup is like a Firebird/minibucker pickup and has a bit more snap to it. It meters out at 5.6 k ohm, which is still a bit low for a humbucker. It is also very slightly microphonic and slightly more susceptible to interference. It is mounted to a low, flat trim ring. I will probably swap this out with a Gotoh/All Parts repro EB-3 bridge pickup.
Tokai fitted 34'' roundwounds to this bass and simply chopped them down to fit. This makes the strings sloppy, buzzy and very uneven. I will probably go with some sort of black tapewound strings for maximum British Invasion tones.
As for the wiring, the bass is currently configured like an SG guitar. Each volume acts as a master in the middle setting. I'm planning to replace the pickup switch with a 6-way varitone control, using the primary of a small transformer to act as a choke. I plan to wire the bridge pickup with a treble bleed (4.7 nF cap with no resistor in series). The neck pickup tone control is getting swapped for two schottky diodes in parallel, back to back.
