Removing the top went OK until I hit these nails in the lower and upper bouts.
The bolt holding the neck together came out with a little persuasion.
As I thought, the bolt had several companions!
Top off, time to take a closer look:
Ugly piece of work.
Bottom block area shows previous repairs as you’d expect from a bass of this age.
Top block similar
here’s one of the nastier cracks and edge damage caused by nails and putty! I was interested by what looked like a signature across the linen strip, but once cleaned it appears just a zigzag mark with a pencil. So we know for sure the bass was repaired by Zorro.
Common cracks here. You can see the glue beads of an old white-glue repair on the RHS