"Frankensteining"
I've always liked that term. It conjures images of brooding castles and lightening storms. In reality, bass building - or Frankensteining as it is sometimes called - just involves a lot of dust and swearing.
Soon after I started acquiring equipment for our newest band, I noticed I didn't have the same relationship with my bass I had previously enjoyed. Your guitar is supposed to feel like a part of you, but playing my old bass (my first Fernandes) made me feel like an awkward teenager again. And the new bass I bought didn't feel like mine either. So, I decided that if I wanted to truly have emotional ownership of a bass again, I would have to build one myself. So began a whole new costly relationship with a hobby...
The Squier
The Squier gets its name from the old Fender Squier body this bass is built from. I picked it up on eBay for $15 from a guy who had partially stripped it down (it had previously been a lovely pink), but didn't have time to rebuild it.
The neck is a Lyon (made by Washburn) with a satin finish. The pickups are a Mighty Mite combo at the bridge and a Seymore Duncan at the neck (originally designed for a Rickenbacker). I bought the bridge, wiring, knobs and plates off eBay for a few bucks each. The pickguard was a standard J Bass pickguard I had lying around from my last job. It required some serious customization to get around the new pickups and the front-mounted jack.
Though I'm still monkeying with the pots, it sounds phenomenal. (Thanks to the SD pickup.) I'm really happy with it. I'm also sold on guitar bodies for all my bass projects - they're just so much lighter.
The Ibender
The Ibender was quite the project. Originally, the neck was part of an Ibenez I bought online for $50 that turned out to be near death. Rather than keep the original body, I went with a loaded Fender Jazz body I got on eBay for about $100.
With the wiring already done, I only had to swap out the pickguard, reshape the pocket for the Ibanez neck, and do some minor tinkering. That's when all the real problems started.
The main issue was that the bridge was in the wrong place. When I assembled it, it turned out to be a 36" scale bass rather than a standard 34" scale. That meant the bridge had to be moved, which led to all kinds of horrible screw holes on the front of the bass.
After mulling that over for a while, I came up with a solution: a Fender bridge guard. It covered all the screw holes, and gave the bass a classic Fender finish.