Dirty old Starfire, Dirty old Starfire.

[Alanko]

I enjoy guitar archaeology. I like seeing a guitar and trying to work out what has happened with it, and what needs to be done to it.

As per my NBD thread I picked up a used but not abused Dearmond Starfire at the weekend. If I bought it from Reverb it would probably be called a 'Barn Find' instrument. The guy who sold it to me bought it new, used it in a funk band, and then hid it in the attic for years as he moved back to 34'' instruments. As such it is clean, but its time in storage has introduced some issues.


The bass has one scratch in the top which I plan to infill with superglue, level and polish out. The clear coat on this is poly, which is pretty thick. This means I should be able to level, blend and polish everything in. I'm guessing a screwdriver or other tool slipped over the surface of the instrument near the selector switch. Oops!

Beyond that it needs a new wiring harness, a fret dressing, and a general clean and polish. Some of the chrome work on the bridge pickup is pitted, so I can only polish what is there to be polished! The metal work is dull and smeary, but luckily none of it is scratched. The odd thing is that the black saddle adjuster screws and springs have an odd white bloom on them. It is a bit like a superglue bloom, or the result of some old plastic off-gassing. I can't find the source of this, but it has ruined the black finish on the screws.

The electronics are the weak link in the chain. I've seen this before on Korean instruments; you get amazing build quality then totally average electronics. The 3-way swith is one of those closed in box-type switches. Once they go dead they stay dead. The pots are 500k Cor-tek branded units. Nothing special, and a bit to on/off for me to bother saving them. As per some Epiphones and the like, they used a kilometer of wiring where a meter would do. There is a lot of slack in the wires in this bass.

The frets are green, and have a bit of roundwound chew as well. The bass came with astonishingly dead, low tension rounds with red silks. Maybe Rotosounds?

Before pics:




Green frets and ham.

[Pilgrim]

Yeah, I see what that scratch probably came from.  You have a cool time machine there!

[Dave W]

Doesn't seem like anything that can't be made presentable.

[Alanko]

I was able to work on this a bit last night.

The superglue drop fill worked. Here I had already scraped the fill level with a protected safety razor blade:



Once leveled, polished, buffed out and waxed, the repair was invisible:



The only odd spot is the lighter spot that has appeared in what was the middle of the scratch. It appears that I buffed through the darker lacquer slightly? Or maybe it is just a blip in the wood itself? Or the scratch was deeper there than I thought? It has buffed out just like the rest of the finish.

My other big problem with the top was a hazy spot from playing wear:



I wet sanded this out with 2500 grit, then worked through polishes. For polishing I'm using Poorboys SSR2, then SSR1, then EX-P. I also have 'Autoglym', and even Brasso! All of this stuff has the capacity to polish to a certain point, and the trick is to make sure you aren't just swirling up the finish further, and working out when to go to the next polish.

Luckily for me, the finish has bounced right back!



You can see the little 'sunspot' above the switch hole quite clearly in this photo. The blue tape means that the frets are next.

[Dave W]

Nice work! I wouldn't let that "sunspot" bother me, from the photo it looks like it's in the wood.

[Pilgrim]

Excellent work, and that bass is looking fantastic.  Nice work on the scratch, and I agree with Dave; IMO the net result is light years ahead of the previous situation.

[Rob]

Nice work!
The light spot is only noticeable because it was identified.

[Alanko]

A wee update:

The frets sprung back to life. They needed a wee bit of a level, and oddly the 1st fret was a tad lower, consistently across its width, than the rest. A few low spots and bit of a roundwound chew, but nothing terrible:



The bridge plate has cleaned up, as has the saddles. The black adjuster screws have an odd white salt-like deposit in the threads. I've tried a few techniques to remove this, but nothing has worked yet. I might just resort to Sharpie marker. The white stuff is visible on the end of the E and A adjusters here:



I've cleaned up the pickups, screws etc:



I'm building an entirely new wiring harness for the bass, using a modified aftermarket ES-355 scheme. I'm decoupling the two volume pots by wiring the pickups to the wipers, and using the resistance of the pots themselves to isolate each volume control. The stock wiring harness might end up in another project:



The pots are Cor-tek brand, so I guess 90's Dearmond instruments were really Corts in disguise? The pickups themselves were made in the US by Dearmond; even the insulation on the wire features the brand name of an LA-based wire manufacturer.

While I wait for more wire to show up, I'm doing a bit of work on my Aria bass. I've posted this on here before, but it has since become my fretless 'kitchen sink' modding platform:



It needs a lot of work done to it.

[Alanko]

Bumping my own post, like a saddo. 

I stuck some parts bin roundwounds on the bass, to sort out alignment of the bridge pickup. When the bass arrived the pickup was aligned over to the bass side. I plugged the holes and started over, using the strings to work out where the poles should be.

The fingerprints are starting to appear...



I left the fretboard overnight to take on an oil finish. I mix up naptha (or acetone if there isn't binding or nitro about), and boiled linseed oil. The naptha/acetone thins the oil so that it cures quickly, which means that it doesn't get too gummy and dries with a nice satin sheen without having to put on tens of coats. This is a finish rather than simply 'hydrating' the board, but I don't buy the notion of using oil to hydrate anyway.  

I like the dark, subtly satin look on a board:




A bit of a conundrum happened last night. I fitted the pickups and two of the poles were loose on the bridge pickup. I tightened them up, and they loosened again. I superglue'd them in, which sorted them out! One pole piece was simply unscrewing itself, whereas the other was screwed into a thicker fluted metal insert, and that was itself loose. These inserts fit into holes drilled in the flatwork.

I went on 'Bass Gear Direct' and picked up another Guild BS-1 pickup.  It won't be here for a few weeks, so I will run this on the Dearmond pickups and see how I get on. It will be good to know I have a plan B.

Plus, I've been listening to a lot of Jefferson Airplane gigs today, and now I want one of these. 



Madness. I worry about one blemish in the finish, and this thing was carved up! I like the crude quick-release catches holding the electronics in place and the unfilled pickup switch hole. The bridge also seems to be intersecting the bridge pickup surround. Bisonics look good on a sunburst Starfire! The only catch I can see is that the bridge pickup is reversed, and I have no idea how you do that unless you route out the pickup bezel further.

[Dave W]

Fretboard finish looks nice.

I don't understand the appeal of the Bisonics. To each his own, but keep in mind that both Jack Casady and Phil Lesh quickly moved on from them and haven't looked back. People want to recreate a sound they left behind about a half-century ago.

[Alanko]

I don't understand the appeal of the Bisonics. To each his own, but keep in mind that both Jack Casady and Phil Lesh quickly moved on from them and haven't looked back. People want to recreate a sound they left behind about a half-century ago.

Probably not much to it, Dave. Jack and Phil were both using modified basses through fairly unorthodox rigs. If they were using bone-stock Starfire II basses then there might be a bit more of a case there, but they weren't. Probably there are bits of:

Nostalgia: these pickups were hard to find for the longest time. We know Phil, Jack, Berry Oakley, Chris Hillman and co all used them, but you couldn't go into Guitar Centre and buy the same basses. Dark Stars (and Novak's reproductions) are expensive and therefore only available to a fairly exclusive breed of bassist, which feeds the idea that they are top-shelf pickups. Curtis Novak perpetuates the notion of 'doing it right' with his work, and the notion of Bisonics being complex and difficult to reproduce sort of helps this idea along.

They look cool: Daguet Guitars make a perfectly accurate Bisonic replica, that deletes the fiddly pole adjuster system and complex plastic flatwork/skeleton. They probably sound spot on, but people don't seem to be excited about them because they look more like generic bass single coil pickups:



Guild got rid of them: Guild phased them out and started using hot humbuckers in their basses instead. Musicians tend to buy into the idea that "the older X was the better X". People think that older 'silver screw' Boss pedals sound better than their modern counterparts, and this is within the realm of cheap, mass production stomp boxes! Again the fact that Guild moved over to different tech feeds the exclusivity of the original pickups.

Maybe they sound alright?: I've only played one vintage Guild bass with an original Bisonic. It was a transition M85 bass with a Guild 'bucker in the bridge and a Hagstrom Bisonic in the neck. The bass had a push switch that either cut all the treble or all the bass from the neck pickup, so I couldn't give it a fair hearing.

Seemingly the Guild reproductions aren't correct, but then again the Dark Stars weren't correct either. I've played a Newark Street Starfire II reissue, and it was perfectly nice. It had the same neck as my Dearmond, and the fit and finish was similar. The pickups seem to be a bit 'honest vanilla' in my playing. Everything and nothing! Maybe this is the appeal of the Bisonics? They have quite an uncoloured, broad tone that pickups up dynamics?

My Guild BS-1 bridge pickup won't fit the Dearmond. The trim ring collides with the bridge! I would need to build my own pickup rings that aren't as long as the Bisonic rings, but as wide, because they need to cover the Dearmond pickup route. The Bisonic ring slopes, and has a pronounced roundover. A total piece of work to reproduce.

[Alanko]

I will say this. My Guild pickup is fragile. The black flatwork simply epoxies into the chrome surround. This came undone, so I had to re-epoxy mine. I also re-wired it with coax hookup cable:

[Pilgrim]

Alanko makes a good point that musicians often assume that older=better.  We know a lot more about electronics than we did in the 60's, and I suspect that many of the pickups and switches we make today are better quality than older ones.

[slinkp]

I agree there's a lot of hype, fetish and nostalgia in the bisonic appeal.

I do think there's something nice about their sound, though it may be too vanilla or sterile for many, but to me it's appealing and evidently works well for some people. I have never owned a bass with them installed, but I like the clips I hear.  If I had funds for more basses I'd probably pursue owning something with one of these type pickups.

I also quite like the Lakland demos of basses with their "chisonic" pickups, in fact they were some of my favorite demos in the extensive Lakland clips collection. They sound pretty similar to bisonics as far as I can tell. But I guess these pickups also are too small and practical for people to care about them?

[Alanko]

I also like the Lakland demos of basses with their "chisonic" pickups. They sound pretty similar to bisonics as far as I can tell. But I guess these too are too small and practical for people to care about them?

There was a Jazz bass body kicking around on Basschat with Chisonics installed. I was tempted, but it was a bit dented and chipped. I would have had to track down a neck, then hope that everything worked together.

My Starfire is all back together! I've already scratched the finish re-installing the switch. I used a handy Ebay tool for tightening the switch, and I guess it caught the finish. I'm not too upset, because at least they are my marks. 

That visible ground wire is also annoying, so I will sort it out at some point.