LeftyJ

Not too familiar with PayPal (haven't used it in years, I only had it for my eBay ventures and it's been well over 10 years that I last used that). How is a Friends & Family payment different in terms of buyer protection?

Yes, Jochanan Bax was fired from his position of CEO in January - by his brother and FIL. He'll possibly be looking into buying back the company though.

Ha, I wasn't aware. I only know Hosco from their luthery and guitar maintenance tools. I have some Hosco-branded polish pads and a vintage truss rod adjuster (for the old Fender-style neck heel adjuster type with a crosshead). All excellent stuff. Never knew they also sold guitar hardware under that brand name.

This, and it resulted in 27 deaths between 1970 and 1977. 28 people died in Tesla fires in 2023 alone. Several of these deaths could have been avoided if the doors of the car hadn't automatically locked after a crash and refused to open.

That's lovely! I've always liked the smaller bodied American Deluxe Jazz Basses of the late 90s and early 00s and kinda want one. They made lefty 4-strings in sunburst and a pretty cool black metallic finish with gold pickguard. I'd really love one of the black ones! Prices are gradually going up though, it seems.

Probably! Sanding a radius exposes these layers, but I recon you'd only see the top one if it was perfectly flat. Although I expect a little sanding will always be applied to properly level it after carving it to the right thickness. Unless the laminates are manufactured to extremely high tolerances, and come out exactly right.

The boards on my Status basses are too - you can clearly see the layers thanks to the fingerboard radius. This is my 2012 S2 Classic 5, after applying a little WD40:

This "overengineering" can be quite apparent in wooden necks too, and the difference can be quite substantial. I've had 4 and 5 string versions of several of my basses, and despite sharing the exact same specs in terms of woods, electronics and construction, they always sounded different: the 5-strings have always sounded tighter and slightly harsher, without the warmth that the 4-strings exhibited. The only difference was in the neck, which was always more rigid (and just simply contained more wood) than the 4-string counterparts. My graphite necks are actually the exception here, because the necks on my Status S2 Classic 4 and 5 are more or less "hollow" shells. It was most apparent in my Ibanez ATK's, of which I've had two ATK300 4-strings and one ATK305 5-string (and at one point I've had a second 305 at home that was passing through, so I could compare them). The 5-string necks were much more rigid and those 5-strings lacked the beef of the 4-strings and had more brittle top end than the 4-strings despite being 100% identical in every other way.

That's @lowregisterhead of this parish @woodyratm mentioned having both a CW1 and CW2 and talked about doing a comparison video, so you're probably not crazy.

Oh, lol! I'm on a Dutch bass forum too, and there's a guy there with the username Owjeej which would more or less translate to Owno (oh no) phonetically, who just bought a Mullarkey too. Quite the coincidence! The only thing off was your mention of a Serek, when he compared his to a Mustang instead on our Dutch forum

LOL I've got a few US-made guitars, but I bought all of them used and (in most cases) local to me, so the money has long been sent back to the US by someone else before me. I see no point in shame or guilt about owning items made by US-based companies. I won't enjoy using them any less

This sums up my experience on my Fender MIJ 1975 Jazz Reissue pretty well too. Slightly enhanced brightness, tighter lows, somewhat diminished fundamental - and to me, no perceived boost in sustain / note decay. I do like it a lot, it's been on that bass for some 15 years now and it's not coming off any time soon

The bio on their site is quite ambiguous about it, but the concept was in fact designed by this guy, who founded Catalyst Guitars. He called the material he came up with "SoundCompound", which was cast around a carbon graphite base structure. Aristides' bio doesn't mention a previous company using it, and only names "a team of Dutch scientists at Delft Technical University", but Catalyst were a pretty cool company. Their designs were more traditional than what Aristides does, but the technical concept was definitely very cool: Catalyst Instruments est 1996. – Jedistar

Done! Will you be sharing the results of your survey / thesis once it's done? Might be an interesting read.

Unrelated to your quest, but they look remarkably similar to Chris Larkin basses. I wonder if they're related in any way? Never heard of Fingerbone. Edit: did a quick Google and found out they were made in Crowborough in the 1980s by Paul Richardson, in the former workshop of Manson Guitars, and later in Brighton.