Mediocre Polymath

I remember seeing that finish on an old "Thor Sound" guitar in a local shop a few years ago. It does look really neat. I'm always tempted to try that sort of solid/natural finish on one of my own builds.

I'm tempted by the PBM. I have some informal gigs coming up where it would be really handy to have a gig-bag-sized amp. It's pricier than others like the TE Elf or the Warwick Gnome, but I should probably put my money where my mouth is and support UK businesses trying to actually make stuff. It also looks like it could be used to hammer in nails or defend against bear attacks, which might be handy.

Depends if it's new wood (an offcut) or something recovered during some demo work (like a bit of joist from an old roof). If it's new, then it's most likely Red Grandis (Eucalyptus), which is a plantation-grown hardwood. It looks a little pale for Grandis, but then phone cameras can be finicky when it comes to colour. I've not seen it used in any production guitars, but it's nice wood – dense-grained but light. I use it for the cores of multi-laminate bodies like this guitar: If it's not new then it could be almost anything. Best guess would be – as others have suggested – some form of mahogany, probably sapele.

Thanks. There is a lot of glue in the channel, but I don't know if it's actually gluing anything to anything – I can't imagine titebond does much for carbon fibre. The rod is primarily held in place by being smushed between the neck and the fingerboard.

Not a bass, so I figured I'd put this here rather than in the repairs/build-diaries forum. The weekend after New Year's I headed out to the countryside to collect this old East-German mandolin from @bass_dinger. I've been a mandolin dilettante for years (family of folk musicians) but I've never had my own one, not really. (I have an electric mandolin I made out of offcuts while working on something else, but I don't play it much). I figured the price was low enough to be worth a punt, and it seemed like whatever work it might need would be well within my skill set as a luthier and tinkerer. (Please excuse the cat, who wanted to be in my picture of the action). As fairly described by Robert, the neck was pretty bowed and the fretwork worn down. It was never a fancy instrument and it had lived a long life. I put in an order with my luthier supply shop of choice and set it aside. The following weekend, the first job was to take the frets out. I sat down with my special ground-down end-nippers and started the painstaking process of levering them up. No pictures were taken of this process because it only took about a minute. It turned out the tangs on the frets were not only 1.5 mm deep at most, but also completely smooth – no nibs, no little spikes. I could have probably lifted them out with my fingernails. I clamped the body into place and prepared my special heating tool. This may look like a crappy old clothes iron, but I promise it's a high-tech piece of equipment. I used a pallette knife to get under the fingerboard after it was good and hot and pinged the whole thing off, perfectly intact. I then routed a channel and stuck a length of carbon-fibre rod in there. Not the neatest job because my router plane was being difficult and it took me a while to remember the quirks of the adjusters on that particular tool. Fingerboard clamped back on with the rod in place. The rod is the same size as the one I routed into the (thinner and longer) neck on my electric mandolin, so I'm confident it will hold things straight for the foreseeable future. If I'd been more inclined to take my time with this, I would have spent a few hours planing a backward angle into the fingerboard (it's pretty thick and the neck is dead flat to the front of the body, which isn't great). I decided I couldn't be bothered – if nothing else, I explicitly don't want this instrument to be loud. I had to recut the fret slots because even the finest fretwire I had to hand was much chunkier than the stuff that had come out. I didn't take any pictures of the fretting process – just imagine someone smacking an instrument with a nylon-headed hammer for half an hour, swearing the whole time. Here's the finished job. I recut the nut and bridge slots, and reshaped the bridge a little, but left it otherwise unchanged. As you can see, the action has come down a lot, and the fretwork is now level and even. It plays beautifully and I've already lost several hours to noodling around trying to remember various fiddle tunes. At some point I'll replace the dot markers that melted during the heating process. It sounds like, well, like a £40 mandolin – which is what I expected and what I was hoping for. A fun thing for plinking away at on the sofa and during teams meetings (pro-tip! A mandolin can be played without showing up on the laptop camera if you hold it down low).

Indeed. I used to have a late 1980s Yamaha that had a similar recessed panel thing.

I just saw that Ancoats Guitars are gearing up to start making basses. Rather nifty looking things. I've been seeing this company's guitar designs popping up on social media here and there, and they look interesting (though I've never played one). They're a small custom builder in Manchester, I think, with a very agressive pricing strategy (basses starting from £1k, which barely gets you new strings these days).

I've had a pair in a little metal container on my keyring for years. Used them only a handful of times, and never felt like they were particularly essential. Then in November I went along to a gig at Alexandra palace and the support act had the worst sound mixing I've ever heard. They were this absolutely dreadful techno/metal hybrid duo, just two guys and a lot of pre-recorded synth stuff. They sounded like they'd gone to the sound guy's desk and just pushed every eq slider from 30 Hz to 200 Hz all the way up. It was just a wall of punishing mush. It was the first time I've ever been able to clearly perceive a sort of standing wave – there was a point near the back of the room where the bass was reflecting off the wall and creating a nauseating out-of-phase throbbing effect. My ears started to hurt immediately and so I popped in my earplugs. It was such a relief. I was the only person from the group I went with who wasn't half-deaf by the time the main act came on.

You jest, but that is a thing. They're called the Olllam and they're a great live band. Only time I've ever heard a crowd cheer the Uilleann pipes coming in like it was a bass drop at a rave.

Agreed on the Hakko. Downsides are that it looks like it was made by Fisher-Price and that it has a two button interface that makes the even most inscrutable 1980s multifunction digital watch seem intuitive by comparison.

I generally don't subscribe to the idea that substances do anything for creativity or the like, but it's a fact that The Faces in live recordings – with a line of liquor bottles set up on the organ and the band giggling and jeering – were an absolute racous powerhouse, while The Faces in the studio were always a bit underwhelming.

Bought an old mandolin off Robert this morning. Lovely chap, and a nice straightforward transaction.

Mine is, like my fellow bandless bassists in this thread, to try and get a new band together/join an existing one. I'm not the most outgoing person, so throwing myself into new band situations is always something I need a bit of a mental run-up for. The other big one is to persevere with my ongoing efforts to learn to read sheet music properly. I'm definitely making progress with this (I started back in August with a copy of Joquin des Pres's book on sight-reading) but it's clearly going to be a multi-year undertaking as I'm starting as a 40 year old with no musical education whatsoever.

Seconded, as a non-vegetarian. Ground up bone filings smell absolutely vile.