I've been looking for a cheap project bass with the idea of trying some alternate pickups and maybe different wiring setups, and i found a good candidate in this Danelectro Rumor:

It looks good, but it did need work. The fretboard was filthy, with oddly deep string dents in the wood, like it was often piled up with other gear and no case. The output jack also wasn't soldered in, so the signal crapped out at the first practice. I rewired everything and it worked correctly, and with a good cleaning and setup it played well too.

This was an odd bass for Danelectro, a cheap novelty model from the early 2000s. It was only $200 new, and featured a built-in chorus circuit. That chorus circuit sounds pretty good, but it's also very noisy, with a constant floor of static. The precision-style pickups are not typical for Danelectro and i don't really want another p-bass, but that's fine, because i'm planning to swap that anyway.

The attractive things about the bass for me were the Mosrite-like shape of the body, which i really like, the long scale (many classic Danelectros were shorter scale), and the solid construction. Classic Danos are mostly hollow, with a top and bottom cap of masonsite board, which would be fairly difficult to modify. This one has a solid plywood body that's still quite light, but easier to carve up as needed for different pickups.

On to the mods:

You can see the upper cavity for the triangle-shaped chorus board and split coil pickups. I'm trying a Thunderbird-style humbucker pickup, and centering it in the same position as the original pickup. I measured out the center line of the body and pickup and only needed to remove a couple of corners. 

Even though the humbucker should be pretty quiet, i added copper tape to fully shield the cavity, then wired things temporarily on a breadboard for testing.

I'm wiring it up like a Thunderbird II, which also used a single pickup. 250k tone pot, 500k volume, very simple.

Then on to the new pick guard. I had some black-white-black material left over from an earlier guitar project and i like the shape of the original, so i reproduced that but fit to the new pickup.

It's winter and i don't feel like setting up my router table in the unheated garage to make a proper template, so i went low tech. I rough-cut the shape with coping and jeweler's saws, then filed to the final curves and scraped the edge bevel. 

The plastic dust and shavings are messy and inevitable, but the end result was good. 

I went slowly and snuck up to a perfect fit around the pickup, so i haven't decided if i event want to use the nickel trim ring that fits around it. The knobs were found at Ax-man, nicely knurled aluminum.

How does it sound? It's surprisingly bright. At first i thought i was missing a lot of bottom end, but i think it's just putting out a lot more top range than my other basses so that's mostly what i hear. I might swap the 500k for a 250k, which should mellow out the treble some. I'm going to give it some time for my ears to adjust and work with the amp EQ before i decide. I may also try other options if i can find something interesting for cheap.