JoeEvans

I'm very happy with my current TE Elf, which does the job just fine for me. But unless nostalgia is distorting my judgement, I still don't think anything sounds as good as my old TE 4x10 combo, despite the inconvenience of lugging it around. That particular model was so heavy that you had to make appreciably more effort to walk away from it than towards it.

I would take a look at the Double Bass Room website if you want to buy, and/or give him a ring. He often has a selection of decent laminated basses for under £1000. Or look on this site.... Best bet would be an older bass with laminated back and sides but solid wood top, but a decent all laminate one is ok too. I would always buy secondhand myself, you can sell on for at least what you paid for it. Ask a teacher (of the double bass, not maths or whatever) to look at whatever you buy and advise on any set-up work needed.

12mm would be plenty strong enough if you can make the joints strong. I've got a 15' rowing boat made of 6mm... If you can fit a decent size batten in at the corners, ideally made of hardwood or decent quality softwood, that would be easily strong enough I reckon, glued with good wood glue (eg Gorilla) and screwed to hold it all together while the glue goes off. Then sand off the exteriors corners to leave them nicely rounded and paint or cover with vinyl or something....

18mm ply feels like overkill to me, I would have thought 12mm would be ample. If you Google "flight case parts" you should find loads of options for aluminium edge extrusions, although they tend to be for much thinner material, usually 6 or 7mm.

It's harder than it ought to be to join two pieces of plywood at right angles to each other. If you use screws they're going into end grain and won't hold as well; glue only has a small surface area with a lot of leverage to pull it apart The ideal would be to use a router and a dovetail template to dovetail the corners. If you did that, the joins would be so strong that you could use lighter ply - maybe 9mm. I think flight case suppliers sell aluminium extrusions for forming right angle joints. That would be a much quicker option and cheaper by far if you don't already have a router...

1810, or 1870, or even 1890? It looks like he had a batch of labels made with just the 18 printed, and added the actual year as required.

Buying a bass is a very ethical choice - they last indefinitely and all the components are either recyclable or compostable. They are also a very sensible investment. If you buy a good bass secondhand you can generally sell it for what you paid for it or a bit more, so the total cost of your ownership would be zero. The equation for pleasure per pound would be: Hours of pleasure per year / annual cost of ownership. If you get it out and noodle for ten minutes a day, that looks like this: 50 / 0 = infinity A bass can therefore provide infinite fun per pound. As a finance manager I can assure you that that represents excellent value.

If you don't spend much time up at the top of the neck you could put a strap.button on the lower horn.

If you run your finger over the affected areas, is the wood still smooth and in shape? If there had been a hard knock -hard enough to chip off good varnish - the wood would be slightly crushed or dented. I can't quite see what's going on from the pics. If it's all smooth and undamaged, it's definitely a problem with the varnish.

Tung is said to penetrate but it doesn't actually go very deep. The great advantage is ease of application - just rub it on with a cloth, and coats can go on wet on wet if required. A few coats gives a nice semi-matt oiled finish, and a lot of coats gives a lovely soft gloss. Any chips or scratches can be immediately touched up. On a full blown orchestral bass I might be more cautious in case it affected the sound in some way (I strongly doubt it would but who knows...) But on a small bodied bass or EUB I'd give it a go.

Reflecting on this, I think if it was mine, I'd try rubbing a bit of tung oil into one of the damaged bits to see how it came up. If it looked good, I'd probably touch up ongoing damage with that until it got too extensive or I found myself with time on my hands, at which point I'd do a DIY refinish, carefully sanding off the lacquer with very fine paper and applying 4-5 coats of tung oil, the first couple diluted with 20% or so white spirit.

Looks like poorly adhering lacquer to me, either a poor quality product or bad surface preparation. I would just leave it until it gets really bad then maybe look at a refinish. Has anyone used tung oil to touch up double bass finishes? That's what I normally use to touch up woodwork in other situations.

You did the Jazz Odyssey for a festival crowd...

I'm remembering Lemmy's comment about Level 42, to the effect that they were a great band, and would sound even better with a bass player. Catty, but some truth in it - there is a job that someone needs to do, musically.

Yes - I'm not necessarily talking crazy solos, just constant variation and creativity within the basic pattern.

I always felt that part of the point of being a bass player (as opposed to any other instrument) is that you get to improvise all the time, whereas the others are more locked in to set tunes, chords and riffs.

I find when I start to do some new manual activity, callouses form at first, then in due course they get replaced my more normal-looking but somehow thicker and more resilient skin.

On the topic of the heading, I once attended a hilarious event in which a load of hifi buffs did a blind test of various eye-wateringly expensive speaker cables. When the results were collated, it turned out that their preferences were entirely random, with no significant patterns at all; not only that but the naughty technician managing it had thrown in two lengths of 1.5mm twin and earth mains cable, which scored just as highly as the £100 per metre ones woven out of unicorn's derrière-hair.

Robbins Timber in Bristol are the specialists for veneers, they should be able provide 1mm but you could always glue in a strip of 2mm and plane or sand it down flush. EDIT just looked back and saw that this was five years ago! Ah well Robbins are still good....

I play with ceilidh bands from time to time for weddings etc. I once managed to slide the Good Times bassline underneath an Irish reel (The Dunmore Lasses if I remember rightly) and I very much enjoyed that and I wanted to find other classic disco basslines that would suit with trad tunes but nothing has come to mind just yet...

I just ordered an HPF pedal from Sine Effect via eBay, with an adjustable cut frequency (unlike some others with are fixed at around 30hz). I'm looking forward to trying this out live, not just for feedback control but for enhanced clarity of tone - I think there's a lot of subsonic thumping going on when you play pizzicato on DB.

If there isn't enough time to rehearse with the existing band, how are they going to bring in a new bass player? I would tell them to go for it and good luck with the gig.

The non-negotiable essentials for being in a band: 1. Turning up. 2. Being able to play the tunes.