Mediocre Polymath

We once, when reattaching a radiator that had fallen off the wall, had to use a screw so long that we went through the wall into the next room.

Another weekend of incremental progress. I was out being sociable on saturday, and being slightly hungover today, so I was only really able to do stuff on Friday and Sunday afternoon. I'd decided early on that I was going to give this bass a full refret, and I figured that bit should probably be next in the order of operations. That way if I clip the body with a fret-cutting-saw or file, then I can address it when I'm tidying up the body before spraying. This might seem a little drastic, as the frets weren't in terrible shape, but I have my reasons. The first, and simplest, is that I may as well do it if I'm going to be putting in a dozen or so hours on restoring the instrument. The frets as they were could have been dressed and polished, but they would always have been a bit sub-par. The second is that I noticed that the fretboard is very low to the body by design, and that the saddles on the bridge appeared to be as low as they'd go. Obviously I've not seen what the action is like with strings on (I got this in bits), but those details were enough to make me a little worried that I might have trouble setting the action, especially if I had to dress the frets down any lower. To that end I ordered some super-jumbo fretwire – 3 mm x 1.47 mm – figuring it will raise the "floor" of the action up a bit, and hopefully give me a bit more leeway with saddle adjustment. The height of the existing frets was about 1.2 mm. It doesn't sound like much, but it's a big difference in terms of feel. I like my fretted basses to be really emphatically fretted, if I want low-profile and smooth I play my fretless. First job was to take the frets out, which just involves carefully pulling them with a set of end-nippers ground down to have an edge that's flush with the front. After that I relaxed the truss rod and levelled the board with light sandpaper and a levelling beam. This fretboard was already more or less fine, so I was really just doing this to tidy some of the tear-out around the fret slots. I have to admit that I didn't do the most careful job with the fret pulling on this occasion. Nothing that can't be addressed with some sawdust and glue down the line though. I radiused the fretwire with my home-made fretwire radiusing tool. This is just three bolts through a old chopping board, with a set of roller-bearings and washers spaced so that you can tighten up the radius on wire. Trying to do fretwork with wire that's a bigger radius than the board you're trying to bash it into is a maddening experience and the results always suck. Professional versions of this tool are adjusted with set-screws and gears. I adjust the radius on mine by gently whacking the middle roller with a hammer. After that comes the arduous and boring task of cutting fretwire to size. This just involves standing at the workbench with a big pair of nippers, cutting off each fret-length piece until your hands hurt. The last few times I've done this it's been on acoustic guitars. Going from those to a 24-fret bass was an annoying experience. If you have the proper tools this goes a lot faster, and with less bruising of the hands, but the proper tools cost like £200 and take up a lot of space. Then, if you think that's boring the next job's even worse. If you don't have a tang-nipper (again, those cost about £200) then the only way to take the ends off the fret tangs so they don't look ugly on the fingerboard edges is to file them off one at a time in a vice. I genuinely don't think I would have gotten into guitar building as a hobby if if weren't for the ubiquity of podcasts and aubiobooks. Finally, you take the fretwire and you bash it in with a hammer. You can get professional results this way, it's just slower and takes a little more care and finesse than using a radius clamping caul and a fret-press. I don't have the space for either, and wouldn't want to spend that much money, so I've just gotten very practiced with my nylon-headed hammer. Pro tip: If you're installing frets at about 7 pm on a sunday evening in a thin-walled terraced house, do it on the kitchen floor. This is just a thin rug over tile on concrete, nothing to reverberate and boom with each hammer blow. The next step is to file off the ends and dress the frets, but I've run out of time for this weekend.

It's been a slow week of work on this. Just building up layers of epoxy to fill the various dents, dings and repair joins. I'll do the refret tomorrow hopefully, and then prep it for painting some time next week. I think I'm going to go down the cheap plastic greenhouse route for my spray-booth.

The walls of my late-victorian terrace are seemingly made of a mixture of sand and, er, cheese? So I don't hang anything heavier than an acoustic guitar by its neck. I keep my basses and various other household instruments in a big wooden rack that fits into an alcove. It's something my wife designed and made from the remains of a heavy oak table. I'd been looking for a new stand to replace my manky old one, but found they're all designed with guitars in mind – that means basses sit leaning back at an angle, forcing you to either bash them into the wall all the time or make bad use of space by leaving a 30-cm gap behind the rack. Here's the design mock-up in my wife's old workshop with CNC'd dummy versions of my basses.

This is true, pirate's facilities could probably stand to be staffed better, or at all, but they do at least have luxurious amenities like fire escapes and up-to-code wiring. That's more than can be said for a lot of studios in London.

Latest step is a much smaller job. I just got some 12 mm and 6 mm dowel, and cut short plugs for each of the unwanted holes. The 12 mm section was for the back, where a bigger wider set of holes had been drilled part-way through, presumably to allow for the fitting of some switches with short bushings. The 6 mm went in the front. Both pieces were fairly tightly fitted so I didn't need to clamp them, though I did put some tape over the lowest one to hold things in place. I trimmed off the excess material with a chisel and sanded it all down. I'll need to put a few dabs of lacquer on there and sand it some more before I spray the body, because otherwise that end-grain is going to show through.

Good call on the lighting stand. I've got some painting to do soon and it's given me an idea. I don't have a lighting stand but I do have a similarly sturdy and be-tripodded bike maintenance stand. I've always used the W S Jenkins grain filler that Tonetech sell. Not sure if it's good or not really as I don't have much to compare it to, but it's another option if you need one.

I used to rehearse with a band in one of Pirate's locations in London. The room we used had a Rumble 800 into a 4-ohm 6x10 cab. Quite often we'd get there and every knob on the bass amp was turned up to the max, as well as most of the knobs on the guitar amps. Bear in mind this was a room about the size of the living room in a typical victorian terrace. We assumed someone was doing it as a joke, but then one day I ended up there about 20 minutes early, and heard the metal band that rehearsed in the room in the slot before ours. They really were running everything flat out all the time.

It's a matter of tradition for me that every time I put in a big order with Digikey or CPC, at least one of the components I've bought will turn out to be wildly off spec – we're talking resistors rated to 600 volts the size of my thumb, or surface mount capacitors the size of a grain of sand.

Thanks. In other news, I'm currently trying to order some of the electric gubbins I'll need to finish this job, and generally raging at the electronics gods. Why is it that if you need, say, a 500k blend pot and two 500k audio taper pots, every shop will only have one or the other in stock, or they'll have both in stock but with different bushing lengths, or shaft types, or bushing diameters! Then when you finally find a shop that has an acceptably close-enough set of components, they don't have any barrel jacks, or knobs! Every time I place an order for guitar parts I end up having to buy like six small and inexpensive items from three or four different shops, paying as much for shipping as I do for parts. This is despite each shop, in theory, selling everything I need. As it is, I think I'm going to have to get the knobs, strap buttons and one of the two types of pot from Northwest, the output jack, other kind of pot and pickup rings from Armstrong and the fretwire from Tonetech.

So, having sorted out the damage to the back, it was time to figure out what to do about the damage on the front. This wasn't as bad as the great big hole, but it was ugly, and in a very visible spot on the front of the instrument. Here's a picture of it after I'd finished the sanding, the black lacquer dust that got into the grain makes the detail of the damage easier to see in a photo. I decided that, as with the hole in the side, I was going to have to make a bigger but neater hole if I was going to patch this cleanly. First I drilled two 20-mm diameter holes centered on the existing screw holes for the Roland GK pickup. I used a forstner bit, so the holes are completely flat at the bottom. The drill stand meant that I was able to make each hole exatly 3 mm deep. Once that was done, I used the router base for my dremel to join the two holes up and create a uniform 3-mm deep channel where the gouge was. In theory I probably could have done all this with the dremel, but the plunge functions of that router base are really wobbly and unreliable, so I prefer to pre-drill and then have it set at a fixed depth. Here's the finished channel, and the maple inlay piece I shaped to fit inside it. This was scrap rock maple from an old guitar build, painstakingly shaped and measured out, not – as it unfortunately looks – the stick from an ice-lolly that I fished out of a bin. This was glued in with the help of an enormous brick of PTFE (non stick!), trimmed to shape and planed level. The plane I used for this has a blade that I ground into a slightly convex shape, so I can use it on surfaces like this without worrying about a sharp corner digging in. And here's the finished patch. (I fixed that little notch in the right hand side of the bridge cutout).

I should mention that @Chienmortbb very kindly threw in the Roland midi pickup and its associated internal gubbins gratis, but after an afternoon of reading spec-sheets and sketching ideas, I decided that this wasn't something I wanted for this bass. It would have complicated the project – particularly the wiring – massively, and given that I don't have the accompanying floor unit (and no plans to acquire one) it didn't seem worth the hassle. I'll put it up in the recycling forum when I get a moment to properly inventory what bits are there, because I'm sure it's of use to someone. Having ruled that out, I started going through the steps I'd need to take to restore it to stock condition. I decided, after a fair while spend staring and mumbling to myself, that the hole in the side called for drastic measures. If I was to make this bass look decent and return it to its original configuration (with the strap button on either side of the bridge) I needed to plug the hole, but the current routing (if you can call it that) was so raggedy that squaring it off well enough to glue in a plug would be near impossible. Therefore, I grabbed my chisels and a sharp tenon saw and cut out the whole section. No way out but through! After tidying this new gouge, I cut a piece of wood from some scrap timber I had in my heap of scrap timber (everyone should have a good heap). This was planed and finessed into shape. I used rasps and sharp little chisels to cut the recess for the control cover. Then slathered the whole thing in titebond and left it overnight. Once the glue had set up, I carved away the excess with rasps and files. I'll fill in the remaining little gaps with epoxy once I've sorted out the other things.

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.

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.

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.

Still raining. Where was I? Ah yes. The neck. This was a much less complicated process than the body fixes. The first order of business was to scrape off all the glue from the heel and tidy up the sufaces where the fingerboard had been taken off. Again, I didn't take any pictures of that process, I think because my hands were covered in mushy old glue and I didn't want to touch my phone. I unscrewed the tuner plates and spent an evening cleaning the corrosion off the tuners. I oiled them and generally tried my best, but they're still absolutely terrible. I should probably replace them, but I'd be nervous about getting something that's the wrong shape to follow the specific curve of the pegbox. This picture shows the corrosion and also the old epoxy and a piece of hand-cut brass tuning peg. Also the scrape marks that suggest someone just tuned the E string with a pair of pliers for quite a long time. Here's the gluing set-up for the neck, you can see the heel, now cleaned and denuded of it's many-layered strata of glue. And a bonus picture that shows just how tiny a regular electric bass looks next to a double bass neck. After I'd gotten both heel and neck pocket squared up and made shipshape, I started the process of shimming and reinforcing the pocket to get the neck angle right. Luckily the basic geometry of the neck joint was all sound -- it was inept execution that did for the last repair, not a fundamental problem with the bass itself. You can see some of the walnut veneer (it was what I had to hand) that I used for the final adjustments. It's just being dry-fitted here. My wife had the smart idea of using a racheting webbing strap to hold the neck firmly in place while the glue set up. I was very careful not to over-tension things and fold the sides in on themselves, only applying the bare minimum amount of force. Here's what the glued up joint looks like now. Not pretty by any stretch of the imagination, but it's held for the last seven or eight years with no issues.

More rain. After I'd cleaned all the glue and torn fragments of wood out of the neck pocket (not a process I took any pictures of), the first order of business was to reattach the various pieces that meet at the neck block (by that I mean the solid piece of timber inside the body that the neck is glued to, not sure if it has a proper name). The top was still securely attached to this block, as was the right-hand side piece. The back was completely detached from it (along with having parted from the top 15–20-cm of the sides) and the left side piece was detached as well. I think these splits had their origins in one of the historic neck-smashy incidents. Like, they were violently snapped off the block then, and either no glued back into position or not glued back well. The steam might have separated an earlier repair, but I don't think those repairs were more than surface-level. I used a long thin scraper to clean the surfaces inside these splits and then lashings of titebond (injected deep into the joints with a syringe). I considered hide glue, but I was doing this indoors during the winter, and really didn't want my house smelling of boiled hoof. I know titebond's not traditional for proper luthierie, but I figured there should be some leeway if you're working on a plywood bass that looks like it was dragged behind a car. Here's a picture of the clamping arrangment for glueing up the side piece. It also shows the cleaned up inside of the neck pocket, with no more manky glue. I held off on glueing the veneers and patches into the pocket until after I'd closed everything up and got it secure. This second picture was taken while glueing up the back. You can never have too many clamps. I have at least twice as many now, but there's always room for more. I also noticed while moving it around that about a 30-cm-long section of the top had come away from the sides at the bottom of the bass. I again used scrapers to clean this out before injecting glue into the gap and clamping. Some of the more knowledgeable readers might be wondering how I kept the sound-post in place through all of this. The answer is that I honestly don't know. I forgot that it wasn't glued into position. Kindly it obliged by not falling out despite all the bashing and squeezing and shifting around. I didn't remember it was there until I was stringing the bass up weeks later.

Around the time that I made the decision about Marylou's neck, I was putting in an order with StewMac in the US for a different project. So I added a thing called a "steam needle" to my basket. This is essentially just a long, hollow 2-mm-diameter needle attached to the end of a length of rubber hose. The idea is that you attach it to a source of pressurized steam and use it to heat the inside of glue joints. (I believe these days luthiers have mostly swapped over to using foam-cutting hot-wires, but this was still the standard tool back then). I didn't have a source of pressurized steam, but I figured I could find a manky old espressso machine or something. I hit paydirt about three months later, when I was idly looking around a local charity shop. I think the staff were a little baffled when a customer loudly exclaimed "PERFECT!" and skipped to the counter grinning and carrying a crappy carpet steam-cleaner from the 90s. I'd hoped I could get the neck off in one piece, but I realised that it would be very difficult to do that without taking off the fingerboard, so that was the first order of business. There was daylight visible under the upper part of the board, near the nut, so I assumed this wouldn't be too hard. I was wrong. While the upper part was barely attached, the lower part was securely glued in with some very old, very hard and difficult glue. It took many hours of fighting with heating and steaming, and multiple scrapers and pallet knives before I was able to lever the thing off. (This picture also shows my weird yellow carpet steamer). The fight to get the neck off was comparably straightfoward. I drilled a few tiny pilot holes with a hand-drill and pushed the needle in. Into the large voids in the joint, as it turned out. Below is what the heel looked like when it finally came off (with much stretching and squelching). From what I could see, I think it was only really properly stuck to the sides of the pocket, which weren't really attached to the neck block anymore. No idea how Marylou hadn't just folded in half under tension at some point. And here's the shredded interior of the neck pocket. You can see some of the damage from its various falls here. On closer inspection, I thought I could see evidence of at least one prior neck re-attachment before her last one (different colours and textures of glue). There was also a lot of grain tear-out that would need to be repaired. So. That was step one done. I had detached the bits that needed to be detached, and without making them any more broken than they were to begin with. The fingerboard, incidentally, appeared to have originally been dyed/painted black (as can be seen on the back of the extension). This had been scraped off the front some time in the distant past though, revealing an absolutely enormous slab of very nice wood (a very uniform rosewood or perhaps Pau Ferro). I'll continue the tale with the actual fixing soon. Unless it stops raining, and then I'll get back to my other projects.

I can't speak to their reliability, but I played around with a V3 at the Yamaha/Line6/Ampeg flagship store in Soho a year or so back and really liked the sound. The EQ was very effective and the overdrive sounds were nice and valve-y (more like an EHX Bass Soul Food than an ODB-3).

So onto the matter at hand. The problems. As I mentioned in the first post, Marylou probably ended up in the attic of a house in Norwood because she'd had an accident. When I first got her, the action was unplayably high. I didn't really know anything about double basses at the time, so I didn't think too much about why that might be. I just did what I'd do with any instrument whose action was too high, and lowered the bridge. As it turned out, in order to get the action even half-way playable, I had to remove an enormous amount of material both from the feet and from the top part of the bridge (not sure if that has a name). If you look at the picture at the top of this thread (taken before the great works) you can see the comically cut-down bridge. This was fine though, for my limited abilities and even more limited knowlege of double basses. I played Marylou in this state for about four years, having a lot of fun even if my technique was probably pretty awful and my intonation worse. The problems started when my original set of rotosounds started to get a bit frayed and tatty. They were probably fine, but I was also aware that Marylou sounded a bit flat and quiet, and wondered if different strings might help. I bought a set of d'Addario Helicore strings, which have a steel core and are higher tension. This made Marylou a little louder, but also much harder to play. Unfortunately, I also injured the tendons in my left hand around this time, which meant that Marylou was now effectively unplayable – the effort of trying to play her for more than a minute or two caused me quite a lot of pain. I started to look a little more closely a Marylou's neck. I'd noticed before that she'd quite clearly had a fairly violent neck break in the past, and that it had been glued up rather ineptly, but I hadn't realised just how ineptly. Note the luxuriant froth of PVA glue and the decorator's-grade wood filler. This picture shows the angle that the neck had been reglued at. As you can see, it's almost parallel to the body. I realized that if I was going to ever be able to play this bass again, I was going to have to get that neck off.

I've been meaning to write this up for ages. @The Guitar Weasel's recent thread has finally given me the nudge I needed to start collecting pictures and writing notes. Conveniently, this nudge has come on a weekend when my wife is out of town visiting friends, which was also the circumstance under which I did this project back in 2018. First. A little background on my bass, cast your mind back to the early 2010s – I genuinely don't remember exactly when, I think perhaps 2012? Definitely either 2011 or 2012. The weekend after my birthday, which is a few weeks before Christmas, my mum popped round to have a cup of tea and drop off a present for me. Over tea, I was presented with a bunch of small wrapped boxes that held – in no particular order – a roll of 120-grit sandpaper, a metal scraper and a bunch of scouring pads. The whole time I'm unwrapping these, my mum was just grinning at me. I stammered some appreciative noises and probably did a poor job of hiding my complete bafflement. She wiggled her eyebrows and said, "for instruments, you know. Fixing stuff". I nodded and smiled as if this explained everything. A few weeks later, and it's Christmas day – my wife and I, along with my siblings, are sitting around at the family home, exchanging gifts and listening to music. My parents then jump up, say something about getting my present, and scamper out of the room. We all hear an odd hollow thumping noise, and the giggling to-me-to-you's of two people manoeuvring something very large down a flight of stairs. I turn to my brother and say, "has, er... mum seemed odd to you lately?", but before he can answer they push open the door to reveal a full size double bass. It turns out that one of my mum's colleagues (primary school teachers all) had been clearing out her late father's house earlier in the year, and had found a double bass in the attic. The old man had been a school music teacher, but never played bass and his daughter didn't remember ever seeing one around. Her best guess was that it was a damaged instrument he'd brought home to fix (probably some time in the 1980s), as he apparently did that sometimes. The following day, this teacher mentioned her predicament in the staffroom, and said it was a shame it would have to go in the skip. Thinking of her bass-player son, my mum volunteered to go round after work and shove the bass into her Skoda Fabia. So why the sandpaper, scourers and scraper? Well, in the 15–25 years it had spent in an uninsulated attic, the gig bag it had originally been stored in – lined with some sort of neoprene-like material, I think – had completely broken down, and the whole instrument was coated in a crust of crumbly, sticky, rubber-like chunks. Annoyingly I didn't take any before pictures, but believe me when I say it was gnarly. I got it cleaned up (it mostly just needed a scrub), replaced the frayed mismatched strings with a set of rotosound RS4000s and set about learning to play it. My wife christened the bass "Marylou", because she (as in my wife) is from the deep south and felt something person-sized needed a person-like name. Marylou has no maker's marks or labels, just the sticker pictured above. The typeface of the school board that presumably originally owned it (below) says early-to-mid 1960s to me. The low-profile BC'er and double bass player who visited me last year to take my old bass cab off my hands reckoned she was probably a Boosey student model from the 1950s or 1960s.

Amazing work. Looks, I'm sure, significantly better than it did when it was new.

Here it is. I posted a build diary on here last year, I think.