Gbone

That is cool! Makes me want to 3M carbon coat everything I own!

Thanks mcnach - Yes it came out nice enough. And I completely agree that it doesn't matter if the end result is a nice guitar. I do think that the body of this one is hardwood of some kind though. I had to do a fair bit of sanding in the cavity to make room for the new pots, which were physically much larger in diameter than the originals. Not sure if you can fully appreciate from the res of this picture, but the grain in there is smooth and flowing throughout. Same story around the sides of the pickup cavity - had to sand in there to clean it (god knows what had been spilled in there, but I sure as Hell wanted it permanently removed!) Looking at the cross section I saw a natural pattern. If it was plywood I would have expected to see that very regular parallel pattern of the layers you see in plywood cross section. I guess some of these guitars must have had plywood bodies, but this one seems too have been cut from some kind of hardwood. If I ever do a Pete Townsend on it and prove myself wrong, I promise I'll post the evidence!

Here's the history of my Encore Bass ('cos I'm sure that's really what Truckstop wanted to learn about when starting up this thread 😀) Found it in a skip outside St. Peter's Prep School in York in ~2002. Covered all over in stickers, one of which said "St Peter's School 1998 Musical Instrument Day" - so I'm guessing it pre-dates 1998. 3 broken tuning pegs. One string remained attached. Tone control knob missing. Someone had written "I hate music" on it with Tipp-Ex - and various other bits of graffiti. I retrieved it form the skip and carried it back to the States. It stayed in a closet for 17 years. Couple of weekends ago I finally pulled it out of the closet and cleaned it all up. Got all those stickers off with a sponge and water. Managed to get the graffiti off with denatured alcohol. The body polished up nice enough after that (and despite some of the discussion in this thread above, I'm pretty sure it's not plywood). I polished up all the frets and oiled the rosewood fingerboard - came out nice. New strings, tuning pegs, and control knobs courtesy of Amazon. New pots - it had these tiny 500K pots, but the fender spec I found online for the P-Bass show them as having 250Ks, so I set it up exactly like a P-Bass (didn't upgrade the pickups though - for now at least). So it lives on. If anyone knows anyone who attended St. Peter's Prep School in York around the early 2000s who used to have a red Encore bass - please let him know it survived the skip, and emigrated to the US where it is happy and well!