The Last Bass Outpost

Reanimating a zombie thread for first post.

Was in my local independent mom and pop music store today to make a payment on a Hohner SE 35 six string semi acoustic I spotted a few days ago and put a deposit on.
Unusually the shop had no customers, usually always busy, and the owner was playing an Epiphone ET-280, the phone went and whilst he answered it Isat and played it and really liked it.
Turned out he'd sold it fifteen years ago to a customer who brought it back to trade five years later, it went to someone else who's brought it back ten years later for same.
That's how the shop works, no online presence, stuff comes back down the line and kind of stays in the family of long term customers, I've been using the place since 1983
and it had already been open ten years at that point.

Instead of making a payment on the Hohner I put a deposit down on the Epiphone and the owner happily agreed to let me pay up both at same time.
I have a really good relationship with the guy who does all the inhouse repair/customisation work, we've done eleven six strings together over the last two years or so
adding pups from Lindy Fralin, Jason Lollar, Sanford Magnetics, The Creamery, DiMarzio and Seymour Duncan, full rewires etc. They'd taken a well played bass and spent a lot
of time on it cleaning it up to as good as it could possibly get given its age, a quirk is that a previous owner has removed the neck single coil pup and replaced it with a
set of Precision style splits meaning it has three distinct sounds. This was one of the things which spurred me into an impulse buy, the second this week and it's only Wednesday! (Thursday, doh!)

It'll be a while before I get it as paying that and the Hohner up simultaneously but I'll get some photos of it up when time permits. I was playing an old Encore Precision copy
which an ex stole from under her brothers bed at the parents house, they'd both long left and the brother was teaching music and owned a couple of Status basses
and higher end classical acoustics so she figured he wouldn't miss the entry level Encore, over fifteen years after we split it's still here. I have a taste for things like the Epi though and about a year ago sourced a Westbury Track 2 bass online and bought that, still has the stock DiMarzios on it etc, this relegated the Encore to sitting in a softcase.

Really enjoyed reading this thread, about as informative as I could hope to find re the ET-280, appreciated.