Well we attended three music festivals. The first one rained and rained and rained along with a tornado close by. That was not fun.
The second festival was FABULOUS, with excellent weather and great music.
The third festival was rainy, drizzle and never had the chance to play my own bass…but still had a good time.
After a minor health scare with Lonnie (he is just fine), I decided to make life more interesting with some corrective foot surgery. My summer will be spent with my foot propped up and catching up on the website and e-mail communication that has been neglected.
Now on to basses…The 1946 Epiphone is back on the repair table and is giving Lonnie a fit. There was a small crack in the upper bout that he tried to repair from the outside; nothing has worked to his satisfaction. So after three attempts the back has come off for a repair from the inside out. The crack was small and the veneer had begun to separate. With the back off we can see where the crack had gone through all three layers of plywood, which is why the repair would not hold from the outside. With the back off Lonnie can now make the repair more easily and it gives a great opportunity to inspect the inside if the bass.
The bass looks to be in excellent condition and the bass bar is beautifully fit. We can now get a really good look at the rattle snake rattler inside…its big. Lonnie of course is meticulous going around the edges of the bass repairing the wood splinters and cleaning off the old hide glue. Taking the back off the bass is a lot of extra work but we have found when the bass is repaired properly and the back is tightly re-glued, the bass is really happy.
Lonnie has dreams of some day taking a good sounding vintage bass completely apart and re-gluing the bass with all fresh hide glue just to see if the bass sounds better. For some reason when a bass is properly repaired and all the seams are glued tightly and vibrating in harmony, a bass sounds really good. That would be a lot of silly work but I never put anything past him…vintage, aged tone wood and fresh hide glue…sounds like a marriage in the low end world to me.
Keep checking back. We want to get the Epiphone bass ready for an audition by mid summer and get the King Mortone bass on the table and the repairs underway.
All good things take time.
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