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Yeah that mod is definitely on my list of priorities. I also need to do it with my other headless bass, as that can be really hard to turn sometimes.

For me it’s the insistence of the use of equipment/a set up that the bands may not use. It’s their performance, they should be as comfortable as possible so as to put on their best show. Now controlled stage volume, well I get that, but I can’t see why it wouldn’t be possible to DI from an amp set very low on volume and then have monitor feed. Given it would be there as a DI it wouldn’t even need to be pointing in the direction of stage mics.

Had a play with a B2 a while back Well worth replacing the 3 plastic washers on the tuner screws with a F4-10M Thrust Bearing (4 for about £5) for smoother tuning.

Actually, I was only half joking. Mainly yellow, with another colour in there somewhere, perhaps spots. I really love brightly coloured basses, and some of the colours Ernie Ball comes up with for his instruments are great.

Funkin up the Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells last night with my best mates in The Audacity. Full line-up with 2 singers and 3-piece horn section in front of a very enthusiastic crowd of diners, drinkers and dancers. Wonderful stuff!

Yes, no problem - assuming the replacement will fit, as not all 15" speakers are the same size. It's worth measuring up first.

Following. 😊

He made me a 35" 5 string neck in the late 80s, early 90s which pretty esoteric at the time. It has been through a couple of bodies but is still lush.

So this is going to be my first post in the build diaries forum that's actually describing an ongoing project. A few weeks ago, I gave in to impulse and decided to buy @Chienmortbb's headless Hohner "The Jack". I'd been circling this project bass for a while because I was on the hunt for some decent (but not astronomically expensive) headless bass hardware. I didn't like the idea of cannibalizing a bass that looked more-or-less salvagable, but I figured I'd keep an eye on it just in case he decided to split it up for parts. The longer I stared at it, and at the complex thru-neck multi-laminate-body design that I'd been working on, the more I realized that a cheap, lightweight and compact bass was something I needed/wanted far more than the custom bass I'd designed. That was a bass that would probably take me several months and end up costing the best part of grand to make. So I contacted Chienmort and said I'd take the Hohner off his hands. It arrived the week before last, packed with great care and attention, and I was able to take stock of what needed to be done. For anyone who hasn't had a quick look at the original listing, the story of this bass is that it was retrofitted with a Roland midi pickup system by a previous owner. This meant it had three extra holes drilled into the control cavity for switches, a recess cut into the front to fit the pickup under the strings (which the previous owner appears to have done with his teeth) and a massive square-ish hole Boo-Radleyed into the side to accomodate the 13-pin output connector. Whatever I did, I knew that I was going to need to refinish the bass. So the first order of business was to strip off the finish – or as much of the finish as needed stripping away. I tried to use chemical stripper again, and met with exactly the same results as last time I tried to use it on a guitar, which is a whole lot of bugger all. Each application only penetrated into the top few microns of paint, and I probably would have made just as much progress with just a metal scraper on its own. I gave up and switched to an orbital sander, which went much better. My aim was not to go down to the bare wood (solid-colour instruments are always solid colour for a reason) but just to sand until the scratched top layer was gone. With that done, I was ready to start patching up the damage.

What a great story! Thank you for sharing, and for returning an instrument back to life.

Rumbled! 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Prejudice is not one sided

Mind Blowing Decisions - Heatwave

As it's a fiver, you can lose the pick guard and go for a spotty finish. Yellow with pink spots.

Sorry to hear of your loss there. Never an easy time and our thoughts are with you there. Sounds like a combination of band members needing to extract the digit and do more and over-whelming workload. I think you're making the right decision in talking with your boss to ease back a bit. I made the mistake of keeping it to myself and suffered no end of stress related issues until i was asked by works nurse to see a stress therapist. To be fair it worked and i felt great after the sessions were all done but once you get back to the day job it just restarts and there's no way out. I was lucky that after 40 yrs service they wanted redundancy volunteers and i was the lucky one that got selected at 56yrs old. Best thing i ever did but i realised that work isn't the only thing in life you should focus on. It needs to be more balanced. My work ended up being my sole existence for about 10-15yrs. Its all i seemed to do. We used to always book a 6hr session on a Sun 11-5pm. It makes the rehearsal a lot more relaxed when you know you have time to get thru your full song list. We take sannies and coffee in too and of course cakes. Have a wee lunch break around 1-2 ish. Anyways take care and hopefully things will pick up once you confront those that need it. Dave

Let's be clear about the 'health problem'. It isn't about volume which can damage your hearing, it's about the stress caused by the regular annoyance which you refer to. David

My hero 💖 !

Righty. It actually stopped raining, so I got distracted working on my new project. The clouds have settled over south London again though, so I should wrap this tale up. Having reattached the neck and planed/sanded the fingerboard level (with an ever-so slight bow to it, as advised by luthiers online), I fitted the new adjustable bridge that I'd gotten from Thomann, using the old masking-tape/double-sided-tape/sandpaper trick to match the curve of the feet to the curve of the top. As you can probably see, even with the adjusting mechanism all the way down, this bridge is a good 3 cm taller than the old one, but still allows for a much lower action. While I was making these repairs I realized that the bung that holds the endpin in place was horribly loose. Many years of being dropped, dragged across the floor and generally knocked about by surly teenagers had mashed up the end-block pretty bad. I didn't have a way to fix that, so instead my wife quickly turned a replacement on her lathe at work. The new one is way bigger, but still a little loose – that's how badly mashed up it is. Finally, before I strung it up, I took a minute to strip the black paint from the tailpiece, as that was made from the same dense wood as the fingerboard, and they look better as a matched set. Here's the finished, revived version of Marylou, strung with a set of low-tension nylon strings. With these changes made, Marylou became much much easier to play (she's currently set up with a slightly silly action of about 7-8 mm on the G string). She was also a lot louder, to an extent that shocked me when I started tuning her up. I think the combination of reattaching the top properly and increasing the break angle really got things resonating. As a slightly frustrating postscript, when my tendon injuries cleared up and I no longer felt uncomfortable or nervous playing Marylou, I decided to put the d'Addario's back on. The nylon strings are a bit dull and clacky in a way I don't like. The d'Addario's were nowhere to be found however. I've turned the house upside down looking for them and have been forced to conclude that I must have thrown them away in a fit of hand-injury-related pique.

They got nuthin