Maude

Falling to Pieces - Faith No More

I've never really had any bad luck with couriers, a couple of times things have happened but we all make mistakes / have accidents sometimes. Being down in Cornwall everywhere is a long way so I use couriers a lot. I've recently bought a bass on ebay and arranged for a courier to collect it. North Yorkshire to Cornwall £12.50 including insurance as an instrument. This was DPD booked through Eurosender using the forum discount, 2 days door to door. I once received a bass wrapped in a single black bin liner, no damage amazingly, someone must have been extra careful with that one. Worst I've had was a Squier Bass vi from GAK, bent control knob, could've happened at any point in the supply chain, quickly returned and the next one was delivered in perfect shape, and a doublebass from Gedo which arrived from Germany with the fingerboard popped off, possibly courier handling, possibly manufacturing error as it was only where the glue let go.

Arabian Nights - Siouxsie and the Banshees

I was just thinking the same. Maybe I'm a soppy git but this sort of thing just warms my heart.

Never Enough - The Cure

Cross Road Blues - Robert Johnson

Coming Around Again - Carly Simon

Thanks for that, I'll watch it tomorrow. Love a bit of NMA, Stuart Morrow was fantastic with them, driving and melodic but simple and straight forward if the song needed it, and what a tone. Smalltown England, such a simple bass riff yet absolutely drives the song. Just that intro fills me with excitement.

That looks lovely already. 🙂👍

Tiny Dancer - Elton John

I prefer their early stuff.

It'll be flown over by Spitfire. Meet Smudger Smith on top of the white cliffs of Dover and settle up for delivery then. Hoorah!

We are now entering the next phase of 'Adventures in Hofnerland'. I spent a long time to-ing and fro-ing over whether to try and find all genuine parts to make it as original as possible, or just get the parts to make it a decent usable bass whilst looking period correct, a resto-mod if you like. Unfortunately for @Shaggy he kindly messaged me to let me know of a Hofner pickup on ebay, I then proceeded to bore him with the details of my dilemma. 😉 And now I'll bore everyone else. 😄 Whilst a proper restoration would be lovely, sourcing genuine tuners, pickups, electrics, knobs and scratchplate would likely cost more than the bass was worth, or what I could buy a genuine one for, and it would still have a badly molested body which is painted the wrong colour. Also I have my Club for proper Hofner tones and my 4005 for that retro 'pickups at both extremes' tone. So sympathetic resto-mod it is. If the correct parts ever came my way it would all be easily reversible anyway. I've ordered the chrome mini humbuckers from Warman, as the Hofner staple pickups are mini humbuckers and these have very similar specs, some switches and pots and my scratchplate material is here. The pickups are four wire jobbies so the plan is to install two slide switches where they were on 185s and wire one pickup through each switch, the three way switches will give me single coil and double coil in series and parallel mode. These will be wired through two tones and two volumes (one for each pickup) with one of the pots being a push/pull which will put the pair of pickups in either series or parallel with each other. This should give me a much better range of tones than the standard ones but still retain the core original tone. If I can work out how to wire it up. 😁 Hopefully everything will be here by the weekend and I can get to work. Here's a few more pictures showing the body with the white scratchplate, to show how creamy beige the body is. The body, scratchplate material and neck, to show how the colour scheme should fit together, the cream and brown is meant to reflect the neck inlays. And another of the pickups which are on their way, I've ordered the chrome surrounds as well but not sure what they'll look like, I'll see when they turn up.

Gimme Three Steps - Lynyrd Skynyrd

Picking Up The Pieces - Paloma Faith

Well he's definitely a liar. Allegedly. 😉

If Thomann stop selling to the UK, the next largest stockist of Harley Benton is ' @stewblacks Bass Emporium', so all is not lost.

And very pleasant it is too. ☕🙂👍

We've cleared that matter up now, I think, didn't we, maybe, possibly not, I don't know. 😁

Maybe they've predicted something 😁

But Brooks and Pashley really are British made, and it matters to some, even down to sourcing the correct tubing from the same manufacturer for the last century nearly. Whether it should matter or not is not for me to say. I was mearly commenting on it.

You'd think these big companies would have better advisors than the bloke down the pub before they suspend sales to the UK. https://www.brooksengland.com/en_uk/

Like it or not, that is the case. Brooks' image as a brand, is all about their british heritage, the same as Pashley cycles. I'm not saying I back that notion, but also can't deny it exists.

I would imagine, but that might impact on sales as buying Brooks means buying British, it's all part of the image. Similar to Fender moving all production out of America. I assume they're just trying to sort out the details and will then carry on as normal.

As that link is bicycle related, I've just seen that Brooks, the iconic British saddle manufacturer has put UK sales on hold for the minute while they work out their plan. The company was sold to an Italian one 20 or so years ago, but manufacturing has stayed in the UK, as that is what the rest of the world expects from Brooks, quality british made, leather saddles, and other goods. It seems logistically odd, but all their products are shipped to Italy, to then be distributed around the world. They now face this odd situation of shipping back to the UK, so have put it on hold. This has, for now, stopped UK cyclists buying the most iconic of UK cycle parts.