How do you get the DIY fever? (MusicMan Stingray 2-band Preamp)

I wanted a Stingray for cheap, so I bought an SBMM Ray4. I knew before buying that the preamp wasn't any good.

I needed a real Stingray preamp and I found the way to get one, building it myself. Bajaman at freestompboxes.org traced the schematic of the original MusicMan design.

UncleFluffy at talkbass.com started a thread where he offers the PCB's for anyone interested. He even uploaded his Eagle Cad files, and this is how I got my boards. I sent the files to Oshpark.com and received this.

After populating the components it looks like this.

I also shielded the control cavity.

Installed new knobs.

And my bass became alive, it now sounds really musical and has the sound I wanted. I still want to replace the pickup but that will come later.

And this is how I got the DIY fever. Once I have bought all the tools to mount my preamp the only thing I needed to build a pedal was to buy the components.