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It's finished! - Archtop upright bass made from a wheelbarrow. neck-thru (cigar box style) made from a solid mahogany door frame. Wheel left on for portability. Technical specifications: * 67 inches tall (1.7 metres / 5.58ft) * 3 strings (weedwackers) tuning: EAD * scale length 41 inches (104.14cm) w/ adjustable bridge * action 0.5 inches * neck width 3.5 inches (8.89cm) * 1.75" diameter body-coloured foam bumpers * sound post and f-holes * bridge piezo pickup (not pictured) Video: https://youtu.be/sYVip9Yxt9w Build album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/jQTKj1hzPv8G117XA Apologies for starting a new thread but I couldn't find a way to edit or remove my old one. If moderators could please do that I'd be very grateful.

Cheers @Pea Turgh. I'm still tinkering with these short things - currently making a headed version that I'm trying 25 and 27" scales on. I'm also in the process of making a new neck for the headless version at 27" scale that I'll put on the other headless. I'll start to add the details to the build diary for these very soon in case anyone is interested. Cheers!

I've heard that Brian Pern is touring with them.

Were you playing at Bob's country bunker?

Chances are that China now has 100,000 cases of coronavirus. The population of China is 1.4 billion. For the arithmetically challenged, that's 1,400,000,000 people. So a full month into the outbreak, one Chinese in every 14,000 has the disease. Looked at another way, out of every 14,000 Chinese there are 13,999 who don't have it. "Yet", I grant you, "Yet". Some more will get it as time goes by, but at the moment the odds are firmly in favour of humanity surviving this. Not all of those 100,000 will die, of course. The Chinese death rate (if we can believe anything their Government says) is a surprisingly high 5%-ish. Estimates for Europe are suggesting that we will see less than 2%, probably 1%. All statistics change over time. That's the nature of things. But if you were to assume, just for the sake of the argument, that one in every 14,000 Brits were to develop the disease, and that 2% of those affected were to die, it doesn't take long to work out that the extra 80 deaths - each an individual tragedy for someone - would represent two weeks' road deaths. You can't sell newspapers, or garner cheap clicks, by publishing this sort of thing. Far better to fire up the panic-stricken auto-headline generator, tell everyone that (1) we're all going to die, (2) it's all the fault of those slitty-eyed b@st@rds in Chinky-land, and (3) that this may affect property prices in the Home Counties.

Dudda, dudda dut, dut, "My Corona".

Half time. He’s doing good

I reported them all! 😂 Actually glad to see eBay cleaning up the trash.

As little or as much as I like - certainly no unwanted buzz or snagging. Tone wise I love a bit of clank/zing behind the notes when I want it. I haven't got many recent recordings but the setup of this bass hasn't changed in over ten years so you can hear my sound here. 99% sure this was using the strings in the pic above, too.

Hey gang Mark has just been in touch with an update:

You mean the more they invest in you, the more they feel that they have to look after their investment! Who would have thought...

https://snap-dragon-guitars.com/folding-bass-guitars 29" short scale neck,. No more need to comprimise on cramped fingerboards. This also means the e-Bass can be used live.

Was actually joking with my rider comment above but I've found in general the more you're being paid the better you're treated.

This happened to arrive in the post yesterday

Past a certain age, nothing is better than a clean loo!

That's absolutely fair and I did consider putting some of that in my post, but my posts tend to be too long anyway. I'm not coming on as a prophet of doom. I've been following this since the coronavirus popped up in 2014 and before that the SARS outbreak. Pretty much any epidemic novel disease interests me. All I'm really trying to do is pass on some of the stuff I'm reading. I'm optimistic by nature and there are things we can do collectively to help. I suppose by giving a bit of perspective I'm hoping people take this thing seriously. It isn't really here yet but people washing their hands will slow colds and flu too, when it does get here properly, if it get's here then the better our understanding the better we will cope. We all know people who think they know best, who will try and leave quarantine because they feel fine, who will fly to the Veneto because they've paid for the holiday, who will go to work because 'it's only a cold' What you say about the conditions and people moving because of the war is all true, I don't have numbers but in 2018 there were 4.4billion air passengers carried worldwide (Statista) way bigger than the movements of 1918. We just have better transport now. Cities are bigger and more of us are urban dwellers. Worldwide there is less absolute poverty in proportion but still plenty of people who are under nourished or who have little access to healthcare. My specialism at university was mathematically modelling biological populations. It was a long time ago but is kind of why I've been interested in contagious diseases over the years. It seems whatever the changes in conditions the transmission rate now in our conditions is similar to the transmission rate then in their conditions with a different disease and so is the mortality rate. You'd need far more fine detail than those two crude figures to do any modelling but the figures I've seen haven't been comforting so far. FWIW I'm checking figures and information before I post, I'll make mistakes of course but i'm trying to be objective.

1979 fireglo 4001 - a lot of scars but still a rock machine!

You sir simply have a cat taped to your upper lip...

The acoustic division of Maple Road played The Harley Davidson Motor restaurant Saturday night from 5:30- 8:30. We play there once every 2- 3 months. We have a good relationship with Harley and they book us for several large sumner events. Great hours, great looking place, easy load in abd out. We play right in front of the bar which is also the route to the exit. Everyone has to walk by the band when they leave , so tips are fantastic . They have a very upscale crowd. They send the band a check a few days prior to the gig. They comp drinks and right before the last set they take orders from the band for anything on the menu, also comped. I use to give you guys a hard time about comped food, but know I see the value to it. And OMG! state of the art clean huge bathrooms. Then we have those places that seem to go out of their way to make it difficult for bands Blue

Very true, but the reality of the business it’s that’s it just that, a business, they’re often charging more for tickets now than at any point in thief careers. I don’t blame him, I’m simply not impressed by his performance. I suspect financial rather than emotional motivation is more salient also

Do both

Here’s one of mine and I get no buzz or clank and very little string noise, if I played aggressively I probably would ,but I’ve got a fairly light touch and I get a nice deep clean tone.

Help Please So I've decided on my custom Elwood C. What do you think? 😎 Question is...How do I decide on pickups/preamp? I think I'd prefer 3 band EQ but torn between Delano, Noll, Aguilar for preamp but no idea which pups. So many options! Difficult to make a decision without hearing them side by side. Any advice? Thanks

Each of those items is from a 'different' seller, and each item each 'seller' is selling has a different email address listed in the second picture. They all have a lot of positive feedback as a buyer, not a seller, and a lot of the feedback looks to be for small cheap purchases judging buy what the sellers who left him feedback are selling. Maybe they've generated high feedback accounts from cheap purchases to then go on the con with all the expenses items they're now selling. Something super fishy here...

To me it just sounds nice and growly. 👍🏻

That is the classic "whacked by a roundwound" look. A lot of my frets look like that

I've taken the plunge and just ordered the RCF Art- 732, selling off all my old stuff. Here goes!

Good idea to have the pots protected, here's one we made earlier... 😂

...and rockets! And pyrotechnics!

There is absolutely no data that's of any value in their ad copy. I'd no more take a chance on that than would I on a car that that lists horsepower as 'a lot', 0-100 KPH as 'really fast', and fuel economy as 'quite good'.

we're not here to help you

True that.

.... with LEDs. Binky Bling.

Good choice. I really like his playing on all those Coltrane Impulse albums - Crescent also has some really nice stuff, as does the recently 'rediscovered' Coltrane album, Both Directions At Once

UPDATE: Aesthetic fascia plate option:

Thats a lot through one speaker, Maybe if you all clubbed together you could get another one too!

Weight has never even remotely crossed my mind as an assessment as to whether I’d own it or not. Maybe this comes from a place where I was lucky to even be able to get hold of a relatively decent sounding: instrument back in the 80’s and early 90’s, so anything would do! i suppose I’d have to think about it if we were pushing 7-8 kilo instruments. But even then I’d have a good crack at playing them if they sounded good and played well!

You don’t go shopping in Manchester then?

And me. Don't forget me. Every night on the Springsteen 1999-2000 tour I unloaded between 40 - 50 tiny glass vials each purportedly containing a dab of Mr Nils Lofgren's ejaculate to excited fans happy to pay me $100 a time for an engaging souvenir / conversation piece. Allowing for expenses, bribes, etc., I was clearing around $3,500 a night which might not sound a lot but netted me nearly half a million dollars over the tour, a handsome sum which grub-staked my first proper weapons deal.

So, Prototype 1: And Prototype 2: In both cases they will be sunk into the body by a couple of mm. Playing air guitar with one of my test bed guitars, they both actually work pretty well and with the jack actually well out of harm's way. So I'm going to pass it over to Tom for whichever he prefers. Then I'll make the final one, just tweaked a bit to get the look and the angles a touch better. By the way, this walnut (recognise it @scrumpymike ? ) will darken nicely with any finish applied. This is the same wood:

It’s a weird thing this relic’ing. I’ve seen quite a few fifty year old plus instruments, they could pretty much have passed for being from this century. I do know that’s not always the case, but I think the abandoned in the garden shed for forty years look that some relics have is a little over the top.

I don't get it. It's an octave-down ukele, so pitched like a normal guitar. This will be next to useless in any band as a bass. So why not get a guitar (or a ukele) if you want to play one? Won't cost you £1,500 either. Right, back to basses for me... 😁

No, I can't see anything but a bearded giant playing a normal-sized bass.