I have temporarily resolved an issue with my recently purchased mid 90s Empathy and was curious as whether any of you had run into similar problems with "older basses".
When I bought the bass of of e-bay, one of the battery boxes was loose and had come disconnected, so I re-soldered the connection and hot glued the box back into the cavity (it appears this is what Rob uses). I thought my troubles were over..
At my last gig, I noticed some crackling, and at one point the bass cut out completely :o!! After a several seconds of frantic poking and prodding, I detected the problem was originating from the battery area and pulled both out and re-inserted. This worked for the time being, but on closer inspection, I found that the little "trap door" that presses the batteries against the contacts was not exerting adequate pressure to maintain constant flow. I folded up two pieces of matchbook and inserted them between the batteries and trap doors as shims, and the problem was solved... FOR NOW. Is this a common problem, and are new and/or improved battery boxes available? Steve
P.S. I am proud to be the first Status technician to post here... this in no way indicates that I have a clue. ;)
Hi Steve,
The battery boxes are made by Gotoh and are now used by a lot of manufaturers. On earlier models there were sometimes problems with the variation in the size of the battery... not all PP3 batteries are the same size which make it difficult. ( Re-chargeables are sometimes particularly odd and I don't recommend them). Gotoh re-designed the holder a couple of years ago and the problem seems to be improved. Corrosion from sweat can also cause problems after a few years. Send me an e-mail and I'll get a replacement sent out to you.
Best regards, Rob Green.
Yes, I had the odd-sized battery problem on my old S1... suffice it to say, don't use Tesco alkaline PP3s, they're smaller than everybody else's! (in fact, don't go to Tesco at all, cos they're environmental criminals)
I'm not some sort of drug-taking alcoholic git.
I'm just a git.