My Tokai EB-3 is copy on the bench! This is my stuck-in-the-house bass project for the next little while.
The combination of nickel bridge and chrome pickups will have to do for just now...
There are bits of the bass that are pretty good, and bits that are a bit off the mark. The model is an 'SGB' something... different Tokai EB-3 models have bolt-on necks or control spacing that is like an early Gibson EB-3. I have plans to modify this bass a bit, which I will document here.
firstly, I've leveled the frets. They were generally level, but oddly the 10th and 11th frets alone were much lower than the rest. I'm not sure how that might have happened, but I remedied it. Oddly the fretboard is 'rosewood' according to the literature, but it has a walnut colour. It also hasn't taken my usual boiled linseed oil finish very well, remaining tacky and barfing oil out of the deepest pores after a couple of days.
I didn't entirely like the stock pickguard. It was quite warped, and seemed to have too much meat down by the controls but end a bit short by the treble cutaway. The screw at that end of the pickguard is also badly off-centre. I decided to prototype some pickguards to try and come up with a revised fit that worked with some of the stock screw-holes in the body but looked a bit more accurate.
I extended the horn on the pickguard and made that end of it a bit chunkier. I took some meat away from the section down by the controls. I added a new screw hole and rounded the shoulder of it where it meets the neck, a la '60s Gibson basses. I'm swithering about making a banana-shaped tug bar to mount on the pickguard, but this might be a step too far.
I can't find 5-ply pickguard material in the UK, so this is 3-ply like an old EB-0. I've not cut the route (a mud hole?) for the pickup yet as this is being swapped.
No decimal place. This is the DC resistance in ohms. Very odd.
Not a whole lot of magnet on this pickup either.
As for the bridge pickup, I ordered a Gotoh replacement, but this won't even begin to fit the stock pickup ring. The pickup ring on this bass is 100 mm long, and the stock bridge pickup has fairly unique dimensions (70mm x 32mm). This is close to some Chinese 'minibucker' or 'Firebird' pickups kicking around. I'm prototyping an adaptor pickup ring that would allow the Gotoh pickup to be used, but it might look a bit goofy having a small pickup mounted to a vast pickup ring.
The stock bridge pickup itself has a DC resistance of 5.5 k ohms, and a strong magnetic pull down the middle of the case. I wonder if it is in fact a fat single coil hiding under the cover.