Restoring a Hohner Arbor MX1 Series – Advice needed

[hairyhaw]

Picked this up off ebay the other day as a project: kind of a maple necked Stingray copy with a ply P bass body. Both pickups seem to be two jazzes bound together as some sort of humbucker. I’ve titled the thread “restore” but I’m going to modify it too and use as a beater bass, so restore really means “make it playable” I suppose. The pickup cavities are quite large so there could be a lot of fun had testing out all sorts of pickups.

The neck has a few issues I need to sort out though. The action was fairly high and there was a bit of a backbow when I received it. I’ve seen a lot worse though on other basses but there were lots of choked notes from 13th fret onward across all strings. The neck has been shimmed. The bullet truss rod is extremely stiff however I’m wondering if its maxed out as comparing it to my Jazz bass (completely different bass but the only other bullet truss I can compare to) it seems really low down:

[attachment=109283:photo.JPG]


Secondly, the string tree has been mis-positioned to cover the G and D strings, leaving the A string with zip in the way of break angle so it pops off the nut when you play it. FarOn took this image of the headstock in another thread:

[attachment=109289:Hohner headstock.jpg]

Its not a problem to move it and the G string still stayed on the nut when I took it out the string tree. The thing I did notice though is that the G string doesn’t go in a nice straight line from nut to machine head as on Fender/EBMM basses, but veers off to the right a bit. In short, it looks a bit untidy. Is it feasible to cut a new hole for the G head and fill the old one in (I’m replacing the pump machine heads with Hipshot HB1’s or something similar so will need to widen the holes anyway), or should I just live with it and get out a bit more?

Any advice would be mucho appreciated!