Alanko

Google suddenly started showing these to me over the weekend when I was looking for unrelated bass stuff. The sunburst bass could be an interesting modding platform. I've not seen another bass with a P pickup right at the end of the neck. Basses with extreme neck pickups (Gibson, Rickenbacker, Guild etc) tend to have fairly unique pickups with few aftermarket replacements on offer. Any pickup in that location is going to be pretty deep and rumbly, but being able to try a Bartolini, Dimarzio, Seymour Duncan etc to tune and tame the rumble is a pretty fun idea.

Most FB Marketplace interactions I've had where I've had to go to a person's house to buy or sell something! I sold a bass to a guy who lived over the road from an airport perimeter fence, and he started ranting about chemtrails... Camo jacket/pyjamas dude bought a keyboard from me. I think I was his contact with the outside world for the week.

Foto flame is more like those '60s Paisley Fender finishes than any sort of AAA+ book-matched maple veneer. It is a thin image buried in lacquer. Once it is compromised, via any sort of dent or ding, it seems to loose strength and start to give way in sheets.

I'm guessing that the '70s Antigua pickguards were three-ply w/b/w, then bursted by hand, individually? An initial cream centre, then grey burst around the edges, then scraped back to reveal the 3-ply underneath on the bevel? Maybe clearcoated as well, as they seem to yellow like the bodies.

I dare say you're missing my point.

Ours is ruthlessly quick and we always delivers our stuff. My point is, most major couriers have a brand identity. Evri is anonymous and exploits gig-economy workers. They've become large and powerful partly through this anonymity, and through paying workers peanuts and setting them hellish delivery schedules. Any time I've seen people voice a genuine grievance with them over missing parcels, damaged goods etc on Facebook it met with comments about how (usually a different driver) is good. Therefore Evri is good as this is their only point of reference.

Evri just typify a race to the bottom. By not implementing any corporate branding, uniform or vehicles, your entire perception of the company comes down to your local gig-economy delivery driver. Any complaint you might have becomes a drop in the ocean, because some halfwit will chime in with "our local driver is ded gud and always stops for a natter". I never ship anything with them and get nervous if anybody sends stuff with them.

Even if you do want to buy that bass, you will have to go to that dude's house to buy it. He will be wearing a camo jacket and Superman pyjama bottoms in the middle of the day, and bore you senseless telling you about every band he's been in, every bass he's owned...

The Retrovibe pickup probably is a generic OEM pickup. They aren't winding anything in-house. At the most they might commission pickups with tweaked specs from Far East pickup winders, but I suspect some pickups, like their mudbuckers, are re-badged Artec or Roswell units. Their plastic and metal parts appear to be built or modified in-house. The basses appear to be built from 3rd party bass necks and guitar bodies. A Dimarzio Pro Track might be a good fit in a Bronco as it is a rare example of a rail pickup that isn't furiously overwound.

I'm sure that sounded amazing through the Watkins Dominators and other miserably small amps of the era! A design introduced too early?

It would be cool if they made an honest one-pickup American-built Mustang bass rather than the hybrid thing currently on offer. Maybe go back and take the geometries from a vintage Mustang rather than relying on the redrawn geometries seen on the CIJ reissues and everything else since, regardless of country of origin.

Sounds plausible. I've seen various photos of Ritchie Blackmore playing Strats with sheared off headstocks. ...or Hendrix.

Chowny SWB-1. A twangy wee bass that felt longer yet tubbier than expected. It did look cool, but I didn't enjoy the economics or twang.

I try and generally keep the A longer to try and get more wraps on the tuner post and a better break angle over the nut. Otherwise you get parasitic buzzing from the length of string behind the nut! I prefer vintage-style tuners with straight-sided posts to modern types with tapering or pinched in posts. Fender Deluxe tuners seem to try and steer the string into a location that doesn't provide much break angle over the nut.

I do like Model Ps, but they do come from an era where if you replaced your stock pickups it was because you want more output, grunt, mids etc. Model Ps are great pickups in a band setting, but I spend more time noodling away on the sofa these days.

I finally found some unicorn pickups. A few years back I had a PJ Mustang bass I installed a set of Dimarzio Area PJ pickups into. I didn't want the firepower of Model P and J pickups, but wanted a noiseless J, and along came the Dimarzio Area set courtesy of EBay. I eventually sold the bass, but could never find another Area P pickup, aka a DP250. Dimarzio never published a web page for them or really acknowledge their existence. I assume their Sixties P pickup is the successor. Finally a set appeared from a UK seller on EBay, so I snapped them up! They are built like Model Ps, set into their cases with epoxy and with two wires per pickup half plus a chassis ground wire per half. Six wires to tuck away into the control cavity! These also have Alnico II magnets, which is apparently unusual. From memory they were fairly mild output and sounded like nice, detailed P pickups. Nothing unusual or astonishing but a nice take on a vintage pickup. Maybe I remember them more favourably as I thought they were extinct... The kicker is that I paid £140 for them and they came with a pickguard with a pre-loaded wiring harness. I didn't need the pickguard! I think the pickguard is also a Dimarzio offering. There is a terminal block for the pickups glued onto the pickguard. I can't transfer the harness due to the glue, but i don't want a stark white pickguard on either of my P Basses. I think Dimarzio offered these pre-populated pickguards for a while, but assumed you would want a white pickguard pre-drilled for a '60s style tugbar and pickup cover. I've seen 'The Bass Whisper' reviewing a similar pickguard and Model P set on YouTube.

We need 8 mm footage from the Kluson factory to surface!

They could have unwittingly taken a tracing of one half of a notched vintage tuner and mirrored it in CAD to create a template for a full plate with minimal geometric ambiguity. It now has two notches. Or they are using vintage stamping gear and whatever happened to the die on one side has now happened again on the other side!

If it was chipped, extra material would be left behind on each plate? We aren't seeing too much metal cut away at that corner presumably.

How would the tuner baseplates have been formed? Just milled out of sheet metal, given a basic smoothing then nickel or chrome plated? Or punched out with a die? How would the deformity occur? It looks like a cutting tool took an extra nibble, or the start or runout of some sort of pass with a rotary tool.

Definitely Thunderbird. Has that 'ring' to it while still sounding darker than a Fender.

I'm confused about the listing as the manufacturer of both neck and body is listed as 'BaCH'. They built some okay vintage Thunderbird copies back when Gibson and Epiphone weren't doing so. The Dude Pit commissioned NR Thunderbirds from BaCH and there was a bit of a Tulipmania around modifying and upgrading them to '60s Gibson specs. From memory they shipped with generic soapbar pickups, which people peeled the outer covers off to epoxy into chrome covers. I don't recall seeing a P Bass copy from BaCH, with or without routes for Thunderbird pickups. They did do a '51 style bass and a sort-of Rickenbacker 4004 copy. That isn't to say a retailer couldn't have commissioned ten of these P/T-bird hybrids to mod into these Pino basses. I think the 'Oxbird' brand is a misnomer. From Googling it, it appears that these basses have turned up in Reverb in various finishes over time. Probably okay, probably overpriced but guaranteed to lose heaps of money if you try and sell it.

Another vote for Brian Pilanz. Order a pickguard from him and leave a message on the order.

A new archival Who album to be released this year! https://shop.thewho.com/products/live-at-the-oval-1971-cd 1971 would be Thunderbirds and Hiwatts from John?

I think Pino modified it latterly with an additional sidewinder/mudbucker neck pickup. Trying to get Gibson tones from a bass built around Fender lines has been an on-and-off interest of mine over the years.