Maude

Well I've now got a neck with hardware, a body, bridge, control plate with electrics and a scratchplate. I'd better start a build thread. 🙂

I really, really like this bass. I bought it to put piccolo strings on, which I've got, but haven't actually done yet as I keep playing it as it is. It sounds ace played with a pick. I've just spent a couple of hours playing along to The Cure, Neds Atomic Dustbin (the high melodic bass), Joy Division and have just blasted through some early New Order, the frantic ones like Procession, Age of Consent, etc. The Hofner Club is nice but in a different way, it depends what you want. My Club has LaBella flats so is a proper thump master whereas the Talman with fresh rounds is really grindy with a pick. Put some flats on and play with yours fingers and it'll be thumpy like the Club, but put rounds on the Club and I don't think you'll ever get that grind, plus aggressive playing on a Club moves the bridge over time. Out of my shorties I had the Club with flats for the thump, Longhorn with rounds for the grind, and this Talman was getting the piccolo strings for some high up melodies but the Longhorn might get the piccolos now and keep this as it is, I don't know. I've also got the Kay but I can't for the life of me explain why. 😁

I haven't got any scales here but it's not a lightweight. It's about middle of the road I'd say. I've got some heavy basses and some light ones but this is somewhere in the middle. It's a big lump of a body even though it's short scale. You don't pick it up and think "ooh that's light" like the Longhorn or Hofner shorties I've got, but at the same time you don't think "shite that's heavy" like some. It's just like an average Precision really. Sorry I can't be more help.

The purple quilt looks great Stew, and the pickups look pretty meaty. How does it sound? I love a good budget bass. 🙂

Haha nice one 👍 But they're normal single knobs I assume, if there's another out of view then I guess it's volume, tone and pickup selector switch.

That looks cool, I do like Danelectros. What is the control on that one, just a volume?

After looking into it a bit more it doesn't look like I can put standard chrome knobs on it. It's got dual concentric knobs but rather than standard size shafts and grub screw fixings it got old radio style fixings. The outer control has two opposing cut outs and the inner control is a lot smaller than a standard 6mm knob. I did think I could leave the lower control as it's very dark brown and then just put a chrome knob on top but the shaft size is now the problem. I'm now on the lookout for some old silver radio knobs but I can see me buying a few before I find anything that fits.

Wow, I didn't realise how quickly a spokeshave would tear it down. As you say very easy to get carried away I'd imagine. That purple heart is very purple. Will it silver a bit or does it stay quite vibrant?

This is probably the first bass I've seen where the headstock looks better as a five string. The tuner arrangement looks quite odd on a four, like the D is too far away. Shame mines a four string. 🙂

@scrumpymike The paint finish on that top horn shouldn't have left the factory really, but that's the only issue I can see. I'm happy to give it a polish up but some may have sent it back. I'm not into relic'd instruments but weirdly I can see this looking great if it was a bit beaten an worn. Unfortunately you can't get a forty year old one with genuine wear and I'm not about to bust out the belt sander. 🙂

Thanks, I think so. I do like the surf green one but I've just painted my Longhorn mint green so didn't want something similar. This is a really yellowy ivory, it's really very nice in the flesh, like vanilla ice cream, which will go with my mint Longhorn and chocolate Kay shorties. Mmmmmm, ice cream. 😁

By some weird coincidence I seem to have a thing for short scales at the moment and this is the latest addition to the fun little family, an Ibanez Talman in, what I think is rather fetching Ivory. Bought from PMT online for the meagre sum of £151 delivered to my door. I fancied trying a piccolo bass and have always quite liked the look of these. I looked at a couple of reviews and my mind was made up. Now I could've just put some piccolo strings on one of my existing short scales but where's the fun in that. Anyway it turned up yesterday evening and I've only just been able to properly play it, and it's fantastic. Really well built and the hardware seems just as good as any bass in the sub £500 range. Paint is good, the pickups sound great, controls are responsive. It's a PJ and when pickups are solo'd it sounds like a P should and the J has that nasal quality but sounds good, both on full the volume drops slightly but back of the J to about 75% and the tone on about 50% and it sounds great. The neck is satin and lovely and smooth with some quite nice grain but very light in colour and the fretboard is quite light as well due to being something that's not rosewood, I don't know what, but I real life looks better than I'd thought it was going be, quite a depth to the colours in the wood. Frets are all nicely finished and it plays great straight out of the box, a couple of tiny tweeks would improve it but that's a personal thing and it'll be getting a set of piccolo strings, which have just dropped through the door for £6 from Amazon, so it will need tweeking again anyway. The only bit that's not great is a dull patch on the front of the upper horn that needs polishing. It's looks like it has been flatted slightly and not polished up properly, or some of the polystyrene packing may have been rubbing on it in transit. Either way it'll polish up no problem and I'm overly fussy with paint anyway so some might not have ever noticed it. For the money I'm not going to complain. What you can get for so little money these days is amazing. Enough rambling, I know you all just want pictures. 😉 This the paint patch in the light making it look worse than it actually is, then some pics with reflections on the paint so you can see the finish. I'm not sure I like the control knobs, but again for the money I can't grumble. Finally the strings that just arrived. I've got some work to do but will be fitting them later. So there you go. I can thoroughly recommend one of theses if you fancy a classic looking short scale. 🙂

Inside the trussrod assembly there is a threaded bar that has two opposing threads, right hand thread at one end and left hand at the other. There are two fixed threaded tubes, nuts if you like, at either end, so as you turn the threaded bar via the allen key, the opposing threads either pull the ends of the rod together curving it one way, or push them apart, curving it the other way. Edit, I should add that the above is a dual action rod. A single action is just a threaded bar which is fixed at one end and passes through a non threaded sleeve at the other, adjusting end. A nut is placed on the threaded bar outside of the non threaded sleeve and when tightened creates tension in the trussrod assembly making it bow.

I'd normally say it's, for me, the pickup that denotes what bass it is, as the above will sound like a P. But the Aerodynes throw all that out the window. The Aerodyne Jazz and Aerodyne Precision both have PJ arrangement but the correct respective body shape. So Fender must think it's body shape, not pickups

I'd never compromise the biscuit aisle. It happened in the bakery section once though, poor lady left with a pair of floury baps.

How about quickly snogging someone as you go past? Although I did promise the judge I'd stop doing that.

I've got a question that's not specifically Stingray related but I'll ask it here as this thread got quite a bit of traffic. I started work on the Prejazzray today and need to order a control plate, everything will be budget with this build as I'm mainly using up parts. I've got a Warman pickup with the four wires and have decided to wire it with a volume, tone and a series/parallel switch, I can really see any point adding in the single coil option as it'll just be a weak jazz tone, if folks know better then I'm open to being educated. What I want to do is use a rotary switch for the series/parallel so it looks the same as the volume and tone knobs, but does such a thing exist (cheaply)? I know I could add a push/pull pot or a mini toggle, but I like the idea of just the three matching knobs. So what's out there folks? 🙂

My P with Chromes, though the silks are beginning to fray as they're so old and it's my home go to bass. So the best advice so far has to be get a set of Chromes. There is no way, short of physically trimming the silks away, to adjust how the silks line up. The string is anchored with no adjustment in the bridge, how far along the string the silk starts is up to the manufacturer, whether you have two inches or two foot of string after that has no bearing on it. You can have one wind of string around the post or five winds, it has no bearing on where the silk starts. Just for the absolute pedants among us, raising the saddle height will minutely bring the silk towards the nut, but that's just rediculous. 🙂

Yeah, and he started at the headstock!

£21 still with eight days to go, and for that reason, I'm out! With £15 postage I didn't really want to go much more than the one pound opening bid. What the hell do people see in this shite?

Thanks to both of you. I think we have a winner. The mirror was edging it in my mind before I made them, but the shape of the plate is odd so I wasn't sure if making it stand out was right. I have actually fitted the mirror one but thanks for confirming I'm not weird. 😁 It also means I don't need to make another clear one, every cloud and all that. On to the Precision one then. 🙂

I want this. I'm not even kidding. That's a Squier Bronco bridge and I need one for my Kay I've just restored as it's 17mm spacing. He can save on postage by burning the rest and sending me the bridge.

That's my thinking as well. Just not totally sure as the whole point if the clear on the originals is so you don't really see it. Not sold on the control knobs either. The lower part is very dark brown and the top has yellowed as well. I did think of concentric metal Jazz type knobs but I don't know how they fit and don't want to spend out only to find they won't fit. The tuners buttons are the same yellowed plastic so they have something to match to. Here's another pic of the mirror one with some reflections which kind of shows how it will fit with the chrome as well.

I've just made two plates for the Longhorn, one clear as per original and one mirrored, to go with the sparkle sides that I did instead of the standard Danelectro white tape. Firstly I put some masking tape on the acrylic and drew around the old scratchplate. Then carefully cut out using a coping saw. To cut the pickup recess I ground down a stone disc from a 'dremmel' type tool until it had the radius of the end of the pickup and carefully cut into the plate. I used my Parkside one from Lidl, I do like a lot of the Parkside stuff, it's cheap but stands up to a fair bit of abuse. Once cut I sanded to shape starting with 180 grit and ended with 3000. The more grades you use, the quicker you can get the job done as you're not spending ages trying to sand out scratches with a paper that's too fine, and the finer you finish with the less polishing needed. Two plates ready for polishing along with the original which has yellowed badly, on a vintage white I'd like the old plate but not the mint green. A quick polish up and we have these two. Unfortunately once polished I noticed that the clear one has very fine cracks around the pickup recess. The mirrored one is 3mm thickness as you can't cheaply get thinner, the clear one is 1mm as per original which is probably why the cracks appeared. I suspect they are from the grinding stone. This picture makes them look much worse than they appear but I might make another one tomorrow with a different method. It depends on whether I prefer the mirrored one. This is the clear one in place, no screws yet. And this is the mirrored one. I don't know which I prefer but just for reference this is the side of the bass which made me think a mirrored one would be good. What do you folks think, clear or mirror?

😁