Not carving. Caving. And I know it is bad.
In person you can see pretty clearly around the bass bar area where the roundness of the top seems to have flattened out quite a bit since it was new. I could have sworn that Hammond Ashly told me when they first looked at it in 2003 that it would need to be reattached at some point. I related that info to my luthier here in Anchorage, AK and he went ahead and did it for me.
What he described doing sounded fairly unorthodox and I can imagine it will have anyone who knows what is what holding their heads in sadness. He explained that he had carved a very small type of cross brace to fit the very end of the bar into and then glued the whole thing down. I winced a bit when he told me this and thought, well... no one else to take it to in Anchorage so I better hope that it holds for a good long time.
Josef Budil (b.1932) seems to have been a real person who worked in Luby for many decades. Studied under Hrib and Pechar and was a double bassist himself according to this scan. The owner of Lemur thinks he may have met him 20 or so years ago while bopping around Eastern Europe looking for basses.
http://www.mtmmusicalinstruments.com/page36.html
As for my wish list, apologies for taking the discussion of the Budil off topic, but I am a man conflicted about what I want and sometimes I don't accurately convey how I am full of contradictions. I don't mean to sound confused, I just have a number of different, sometimes conflicting desires.
The ease of playing and transporting a small bass for most gigs that are slightly amplified anyway is mighty appealing. Hence the desire for something small. But the sound of a big old bass is ultimately what I want acoustically so the idea of a Prescott is also kicking around in the back of my mind. My brother is currently a member of the bass section in New World and the last time he visited he agreed to remind me whenever I started talking about wanting something different that the Budil sounds damn good for my needs.
So back to the Budil. How important is it to get a new bass bar installed? And can you suggest someone that would be able to do that well AND turn it into a removable neck instrument at the same time?