Reviving a battered 1960s laminate double bass

[Mediocre Polymath]

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.

 

Edited 23 hours ago by Mediocre Polymath

[AndyTravis]

 

Great name for a band!

[Mediocre Polymath]

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.   

 

Edited 23 hours ago by Mediocre Polymath

[Richard R]

Well Hello MaryLou,

Goodbye Heart, hours of time, money, the  tendons in my hands ..

 

Following with great interest. 

 

[Mediocre Polymath]

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. 

 

[Richard R]

🙏🌧️