An Oddity...old bass refurb

[Andyjr1515]

4 minutes ago, ScottR said:

The walnut is a good call. Now the back will look like a squinty eyed dude with a Fu Manchu.

SR

 

Well that will match well with the squinty eyed dude who's just about glue it on  

[Prostheta]

Sigh. It'll have to do, s'pose. 

[Andyjr1515]

With the decision of the back panels made, first job was to rout off the panel that 'wasn't going to shift come hell or high water'.  I only had a passing regret 

But first, to give me a decent routing datum, I glued the first walnut panel on the side already removed:

 

...and then off came the other side.  I could almost hear the bass give a sigh of relief like after unbuttoning the top button of your bought-when-you-were-younger-and-slimmer suit trousers back home at the end of a formal dinner out.

...and then on with the second walnut panel:

 

Pity, of course, that I will be cutting a flaming great control panel in the nicely book-matched pair....oh, well 

By the way...Top Tip for panels and veneer work if you don't already know...ALWAYS take a paper impression of the hidden voids and holes before you cover up - you will need to know where they are later!

 

[Prostheta]

It'll be a night and day difference from that cross-grain Oak!

[SIMpleONe89]

15 minutes ago, Andyjr1515 said:

...and then off came the other side.  I could almost hear the bass give a sigh of relief like after unbuttoning the top button of your bought-when-you-were-younger-and-slimmer suit trousers back home at the end of a formal dinner out.

You should write books!

[ScottR]

Agreed! Andy does have a magical turn of phrase.

I always look forward to the entertaining reading in your threads, sir Andy.

SR

[Andyjr1515]

On 5/30/2016 at 0:55 PM, SIMpleONe89 said:

You should write books!

 

4 hours ago, ScottR said:

I always look forward to the entertaining reading in your threads, sir Andy.

 

You are both very kind.

I actually did do a fair bit of writing a fair few years ago.  Never really broke through, but I did start getting a much, much better class of rejection.

[ScottR]

I hope you framed the best ones and hung them on the wall......

SR

[Andyjr1515]

In terms of the carve, there were two things that the owner specifically wanted me to do:

• A scoop of the back
• A carve cut through of the body laminates at the edges and arm relief

I was more than happy with that - the body carve is where you have some freedom to make things a bit more special 

For the scoop, I was able to try out my latest tool acquisition - a Veritas Pull-shave.  I bought it as a prelim to tackling a solid-topped archtop.  This was a great try out and it is FABULOUS!

It made very light work indeed of the scoop:

 

Then I started on the edge carve:

... and the edges on the back and the neck heel:

Starting to look a bit less clunky.....

[ScottR]

I'll say! That back is looking quite tasty. I can see how the pull shave could turn into a favorite. I'd not run across one of those before.

SR

[Prostheta]

Now that is an interesting tool! I've seen them but never given them much thought.

[Andyjr1515]

17 minutes ago, Prostheta said:

Now that is an interesting tool! I've seen them but never given them much thought.

I'm really pleased with it. For a Veritas, it was also very reasonably priced.  

I think it is primarily designed for wooden seat scooping and the like but it it is ideal for smooth concave curves.  What caught my eye is that it is configured to pull.  I find that much easier to use and control than push for this kind of thing.  I have some compound curve push planes but they are quite hard to position right and control.

It'll probably take me an age to get round to it, but I'll do a quick review when I have a moment.

 

[Prostheta]

Do Veritas supply information on sharpening, setup, etc? That would be useful information to share as part of a review I think. I would guess that flattening the back and honing the bevel with a leather strop and blizzard compound would keep it in top shape for as long as we'd need it to.

[Andyjr1515]

1 hour ago, Prostheta said:

Do Veritas supply information on sharpening, setup, etc? That would be useful information to share as part of a review I think. I would guess that flattening the back and honing the bevel with a leather strop and blizzard compound would keep it in top shape for as long as we'd need it to.

They sort of do - and I can certainly précis it in the review - although it's a bit vague about the best way of honing the curved blade (though no different to any curved blade.

The last couple of Veritas planes I've bought have made a big play that the blade back is now already fully flattened and 'ready to go' so it's only the bevel that needs honing.  Based on the cut, I would agree...

[Prostheta]

Very true. Having some kind of guide to maintain the correct radius or curve corresponding to the aperture of the mouth would seem useful to me anyway. A simple method of maintaining that would allow the blade to perform shaving cuts across the width rather than gouging in places.

[Andyjr1515]

Another four things Mick, the new owner, asked for was:

• A tune-o-matic bridge (yes....I know what you're thinking...more of which later)
• To be able to use medium scale strings (it's a long scale bass)
• Some stupendously expensive but very fancy UK pickups - SimS Super Quads (also more of which later)
• My 'swifts' logo

In reverse order, the logo was an easy fix:

Note the "not sure where I should drill the D string tuner so I'll put it in a number of places...I'm sure one of them will be OK..." thought pattern of the original builder or (more likely) subsequent modder

 

The edge shaping asked for earlier was straightforward:

 

Mind you, cleaning up the edges revealed some old friends:

 

OK               NO MORE MR NICE GUY!!!!!

• Superglue wicked in until it was oozing through every crevice in the pesky bass's internal organs
• clamped that tight and for that long until it was within an inch of suffocating to death: 

• And then a VERY stern talking to.  One where it crept quietly back to its case and never made a peep all that night and nor the next day.  The following day, it re-emerged, meekly and humbly and even offered to do the washing up...now THAT'S the kind of respect I expect from my bass builds!!!! 

 

OK....now we could consider Mick's other requests...

 

[ScottR]

Like any wayward child, only time will tell how long the lesson holds, memory being the short lived thing that it is.

SR

[curtisa]

There must be more glue in that thing than timber by now.

Like doubling the kerb weight of a Datsun 120Y with all the Bondo to fill the shoddy panel work.

[Andyjr1515]

13 hours ago, curtisa said:

There must be more glue in that thing than timber by now.

Like doubling the kerb weight of a Datsun 120Y with all the Bondo to fill the shoddy panel work.

That's a thought....I wonder what the sonic qualities of cyano and titebond are, combined with 30% timber.  Might have stumbled across the holy grail of tone glues woods 

[Prostheta]

Well, it'll be around in a million years as a fossil of glue.

[Andyjr1515]

The frets were all lifted on at least one side, had been filed almost flat and were a curious upside down 'U' shape.  The truss rod felt OK in its tightening and loosening but didn't seem to do anything to the fairly fixed bow in the neck.  

Again, proper luthiers look away!  In discussion with Mick the new owner, my judgement was that:

• the fretboard had basically held the neck together during the various self-disassembly stages of the bass's life
• removal of the fretboard was high risk, but the only way of replacing the trussrod would be its removal
• when tested with string tension, the neck was basically stable
• my recommendation was that that I would remove the frets, flatten and re-profile the fretboard, re-fret and Mick would live with the fact that the neck relief might not be adjustable and the action may therefore be slightly compromised

So that's what I did.

The frets came out ridiculously easily but leaving quite wide slots and quite a few chips in the ebony which I had to fill with ebony dust and epoxy.  Once I had sanded it flat and re-profiled it, the slots needed deepening:

Re-fretting was straightforward, other than they needed to have a bead of glue and be clamped with a shaped caul until set rather than just relying on hammering in.

  

This was looking a bit better, though... 

[Prostheta]

By this point I would have considered turning the old bass into templates and making it from scratch, even if it were only for the purposes of time and economy. Your patience astounds me at the best of times Andy.

[Andyjr1515]

To the request for tune-o-matic and medium strings.

I talked through with Mick of the issues with both.  Tune-o-matics are high and usually require a neck angle to be built in.  This bass was originally built with a low height bridge and had no neck angle.  The only way that a t-o-m would work would be to recess it into the body - and that would mean recessing the stop-tail too.  Not so crazy...Warwick basses do that as standard...and there would be enough depth of body, but would it look, well, odd?

The medium length strings potentially compounded this issue.  

Because the string length would be shorter than normal for a 34" bass (usually requiring 'long' not 'medium') - compounded because the stoptail system requires more string length than a fixed bridge, the stoptail would have to be VERY carefully positioned.  It would also need to be much closer to the bridge than normal.

On these kinds of things I always consider the experience and knowledge of the owner.  If the owner is inexperienced - either on the instrument or of construction techniques and principles - I take the firm approach of only agreeing to approaches and options that do not compromise the integrity of the instrument.

With someone who is an experienced player - just as with Tom and his African Bass - my approach is usually different.  I talk it through, point out the risks and compromises, put forward options that would avoid those issues but, if they really want that feature and FULLY understand the risks and impact then I will get as close to that as I can if I think there is a reasonable chance that is can be done.

Mick is very experienced as a player and has many basses, including some very high spec ones and some very heavily modified.  He knows what he wants.  He understands the risks.  He understands the compromises and consequences.

Tune-o-matic and medium length strings, then 

Oh....and could I fit some stunningly expensive pickups...and hide as many of the old holes and chambers as possible... and colour the top orange... 

  

[Andyjr1515]

1 hour ago, Prostheta said:

By this point I would have considered turning the old bass into templates and making it from scratch, even if it were only for the purposes of time and economy. 

I know what you mean, @Prostheta    It certainly would have been very little extra work....

These fancy pickups.  Despite my warnings that putting pickups that were at least 3X the cost of the most expensive pickups I've ever bought into a bass that could fall to pieces and might, anyway, be a complete dog of a player, Mick wanted them fitted.  We had discussions about silk purses and sow's ears...  

Also he had a request to bring the neck pickup further back than the original and 'fill the hole with...well, something...'  

Here were the critical components laid out on the un-routed body:

This gave me a clue of how many voids and old screw holes were going to be needed to hidden

 

The pickups are SimS Super Quads.  Retailing at over £425 (over $600...yes - quite) they are passive with 4 coils - 2 side by side front, 2 side by side rear.  

You can see the 4 coils here:

The switching - indicated by very bright red, green and blue LEDs on the p/up covers - allows full humbucker (all 4 coils; 'single' coil (ie one row of 2 sided by side coils) and a P-bass split arrangement (offset 1 coil front left, 1 coil rear right).

Time to get the forstners and router out:

 

...and a couple of walnut infills from offcuts off the back panels:

 

Which, then themselves needed routing:

 

I know what you're all thinking......

 

 

[Prostheta]

Yes, you do.

Those are some mighty pickups in terms of their flexibility and those LED bellwhistles. I didn't realise they were so blood expensive though. Is that each or as a set? Either way. That's out there, man.