The Last Bass Outpost

It is nice of them to preserve a period feature like that!

I'm not getting anywhere with working with the sanding sealer, so I'm going to have to do a full strip to get down to the actual wood. The sanding sealer is annoying to try and work with, as it is thick, hard but sort of oddly brittle quality as well. I've stripped a few solid bodies, and this Fullerplast-style filler is a pig to work with.

I wish acetone would simply wash this stuff away, but it looks like I'm going to need a wee sander and lot of patience.

According to the news this morning, Can bassist Holger Czukay has passed away.



RIP Holger.

It is starting to look really good. I will post up some photos when I get it done.

I've sped up my workflow slightly. I hit the black finish on the back of the bass with a heat gun, until I see the black start to bubble. I then get a safety razor blade under the finish, and scrape it off in sections. This leaves a brown, caramelized-looking finish under the black. The brown quickly sands off, revealing the wood below the sanding sealer. This sanding sealer can then be buffed up. I'm not going for a plastic shine on the back and sides, just a sort of satin glow that lets the wood pop without looking too synthetic. Scraping inside the cutaways has been a pain as the finish seems thicker in them, and it is a tight area to work in without damaging the finish I want to preserve on the top of the bass or sides of the neck. Lots of taping and re-taping.

I've had to drop-fill a few spots where that damage was, that I posted earlier on. In doing so, and leveling it out, the sanding sealer is getting perilously thin and I'm worried I will end up back down at the wood. I might wipe some lacquer onto this section or go for a wider superglue fill.

The only other issue is where and how do I stop scraping?! I've scored the finish at the end of each cutaway, where the binding ends as it meets the neck. It makes sense to stop the natural finish on the sides of the bass at the same point the binding finishes. While I've scored the finish to give me a line to work up to, I'm not yet entirely sure about how to 1) remove the black right up to this line and 2) alleviate the subtle stair-step transition from scraped natural finish back to the factory black finish. I'm wondering

Lastly, in scraping the treble-side cutaway I've discovered that Peerless used a darker wood inside the cutaway, starting just shy of the point of the cutaway. On the original Gibsons this area was built up from what appears to be binding material, but Peerless/Epiphone simply used a walnut-coloured wood that is presumably more flexible.

Just to throw endless fuel onto the fire, I've stripped the finish around this damage, right back to the clear undercoat. The black finish is stupidly thin around the sides in this area for some reason. 1500 grit wet 'n' dry, in wet mode, cut straight through it for some reason. There is a small spot of damage down to the bare wood where the damage I posted here occurred. I will drop fill this with superglue. But....

Hnnnng! The contrast of the black top of the bass with the natural wood of the sides is really making me think. I think it looks good, and is more 'Gibson' than having an all over black finish. I'm going to keep the sides natural on this bass, as no amount of repair work is working out for me. Do I take the back to natural as well, and leave the neck black?

Like this stunner? 

Duly noted, and thanks for jogging my memory banks! The semi-hollow I owned before was a Shine. The same model is marketed as a Douglas in the US.

The Strat jack was installed at the opposite angle to where it is on a Strat normally:



The pickups were something I rolled myself. I bought a few empty MM-style humbucker shells and installed a P pickup in one, the guts of an Epiphone T-bird pickup in another. That was actually a pretty good bass, and is hopefully still out there somewhere.

Lesson learned, the Jack Casady will remain undrilled. I'm waiting for an area of lacquer re-spray to gas off on it at the moment.

PJ with dual trussrods? Alembic?!

Frankly, the 250 and 500 settings do nothing for me, but Jack doesn't use them either. They might be interesting for people that want to drive their extreme effects with a beefed up signal, other than that it is hard to see what there is to like about sounds that take all the nuances out of this nuanced bass.

I've been messing around with mine for a bit now, and I'm leaning towards the 250 setting. The 500 setting is almost too nasal and pressure-cooked. It is nice to have the 50 to roll back to, and the 500 setting to boost to. This will work for me live, as I don't like having to dance through effects pedals for different gain settings. If nothing else the design is useful, even if unwittingly so. Rather than just being three volume settings the EQ changes for each setting. The 50 has a nice wide bandwidth, almost scooped in the mids. The 250 setting is fuller and more present in the mids. The 500 setting has that honk to it. Oddly enough I sound like Jack Casady when I play this bass.

I'm quite pleased that mine is a Peerless example. It doesn't have that plastic feel I associate, perhaps unfairly, with Chinese instruments. The rosewood of the fretboard is a nice piece, the finish came back from the dead very nicely and the frets are level and hard! I had to do a subtle leveling of them to remove some roundwound wear on the lowest two frets, and the frets were otherwise level up the neck. They were a joy to work on.

This is mine now:



No 'E' on the pickguard and no poker chip under the 3-way switch.

I'm mildly tempted to put a Strat output jack plate on the bass just to strengthen the output jack area and to get the cable up and away from the top of the bass as quickly as possible. Blasphemy, of course, but I did the same to my much modified Aria TAB-66:



On the Casady the jack would be pointing up the way, rather than down. I've also since de-fretted this Aria, and clearly need to learn to leave stuff alone.