So I bought another $100 Soviet bass off eBay...

[ilan]

For $100, how wrong can I go? Guess I'll have to wait until it arrives. It's a Caucasus brand or model name. Never heard of it before.

I assume I will have to change the Soviet DIN output socket to a Switchcraft jack, and possibly the pots. And the strings... got a TI JF324 medium scale flats set ready.

Since the (now) famous Bulgarian-made Orfeus Hebros bass, I developed a liking for this kind of Soviet crap. And with the Höfners, I'm already used to the scale and the narrow string spacing.

[Dave W]

Never heard of it either. Reminds me a little bit of the old solid body Höfner 182.

You probably won't go wrong at that price.

[Pilgrim]

Right.  If the neck is playable, the rest is easy to work with.  It does have a different look to it.

[ilan]

Well, it's here.

I'll cut to the bottom line: there are far better ways to spend $100.

32" scale. Severe back-bow. Loosening the truss rod was not easy. The access is through the back of the neck heel. But I managed to loosen it.

The fretboard was covered in 30+ years worth of gunk.

Some of the frets were protruding. I had to hammer them back into the neck.

The strings were some kind of cold war nightmare. They also stunk. The previous owner was not big on soap, apparently. So I stringed her with a used set of Roto black tapes. They are high tension and that finally sorted out the back-bow. Action is still on the medium-high side but I like it like that. It's playable, sort of, and does not fret out. Most of the time.

Neck pickup does not work. Only the bridge pickup. Oh well. Maybe in the future I'll fix it but not right now.

The output is 5-pin DIN socket. I'm keeping it like that.

The bridge is a beige plastic joke.

The tuners nearly fell apart when I tuned the bass to pitch with the Roto's.

The sound... like hitting a wet cardboard box. Through a Seymour Duncan Pickup Booster: like hitting a wet cardboard box, but harder.

I could say sorry about the crappy pic but I think it's appropriate for a crappy bass ;-)

[Highlander]

Wellll... It'll make an interesting item to hang on the wall...

I have a piece-of-junk V bass (not as in the new Gibson) that I may drill full of holes and turn into a wall hanger, once I've filled the holes with LED's, and use it for Xmas decoration, or some such folly...

[Basvarken]

Funny story.
Now promise you won't do it again. 

[Highlander]

Nah... don't tell him that, Rob... some has to continue to exploit this fervent new market of availability of instruments, exotic...

[Pilgrim]

I think his expression in the photo pretty much tells the story.

[Dave W]

I think his expression in the photo pretty much tells the story.

Yes. Ilan needs to turn it into a gif with his eyes rolling upward.

[Highlander]

I suppose we could start to spill on the turkey's we've bought in out time, like a Shergold I once bought that had a split in the body that I missed... I ended up using an axe on it... loved it that much... or my first car, that had more holes and rust than bodywork...

[Basvarken]

Nice idea Kenny.

This Magic bass seemed like a good idea when I bought it. It was built in Venlo, a small city in the southern part of The Netherlands. I grew up near that place and I went to school in Venlo.

I liked the idea of having a bass that came from my home ground. But it was hardly playable when I got it. The action was so high you could drive a truck underneath the strings. And the strings didn't align the pole pieces (at all). And the top came loose from the sides.
I fixed most of those issues. But still it didn't have a usable sound.
So I got rid of it, after a while. Sold it to a guy from Venlo... 

[ilan]

Some progress today.

The beige plastic bridge broke in half. Replaced it with a butchered old Höfner ebony bridge. That alone has probably doubled the bass's value ;-)

Messed with the wiring a bit, now I have bridge pickup and bridge+neck. Can't solo the neck pickup yet.

Shimmed the neck and could set the action to medium-low.

Here are the bridge, the Soviet bloc harness, and the truss rod access under the neck-heel plate.

From what I find, it's a Kavkaz model Bas-2, built in the Ros-Muz-Prom factory in Rostov-on-Don, and  originally cost 165 Rubles, which was a lot of money (almost two average monthly salaries in the USSR). Today, btw, 165 Rubles = $3.

[dadagoboi]

Interesting truss rod adjustment location.  KGB design?

[Pilgrim]

I think the neck plate has as much value as the bass! Looks cool!

[Happy Face]

I think the neck plate has as much value as the bass! Looks cool!

+1 on that!   

But it does have its charm ....