If you happen to keep an eye on my social media feed, you’ll notice that I ran into some last minute trouble with my main bass this weekend. Saturday night I plugged in the five-string Jazz bass and felt more resistance than expected, followed immediately by markedly less resistance; the sure sign of an input jack popping it’s connection. This sort of thing can happen when the nut loosens up and the wire starts twisting around the jack, which is what looks like happened here.

Luckily, I never got rid of my old 90s Ibanez four string, so I was able to rely on the backup for the church fill-in gig I had Sunday morning.

Fixing an input jack is a trivial, five minute repair (and almost four of those minutes involve waiting for the soldering iron to heat up), though after a few bad experiences in the past, I’ve mosty shied away from DIY electronics repair. Of course, taking the instrument to the good luthier in town always involves several days in turnaround for even something as trivial as thi, even though they do try their best, and do routinely excellent work (he’s the “good” luthier, so he’s in demand), and when I called Guitar Center, I found the tech was on vacation.

Argh.

Finding myself in this position, I decided that maybe it was worth giving DIY another shot. Thanks to investing 9 bucks in a new soldering iron (my old ones are old giant 300w sci-fi pistol affairs, or really old, corroded, and, as I discovered, missing) and a couple of quick searches for a good instructional video and a couple of primers on soldering basics, I managed to successfully effect the repair in about 10 minutes, making a pretty damned clean join I’m quite proud of, and probably saved myself a few bucks (I figured I’d pay somebody 20 bucks to do this) and definitely some time, and can do it again myself next time.

Plus, I got to feel handy and invincible for an hour or so afterwards.