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Old 08-24-2010, 02:08 PM
Sam Sherry Sam Sherry is offline
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Join Date: 01-22-2007
Location: Portland, Maine
Posts: 53
Sam Sherry is on a distinguished road
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Well, if nobody's truly going I suppose I'll take a whack.

Around 2000 I got a bass on trade from my pal Glenn. Lovely old Czech bass with a label of "Alois Bittner" from the early 20th. The bass was in many pieces and Glenn, a bass-player who ran a piano-repair shop, promised to put it back together. And he did, but it fell apart again. So Glenn said he'd "really fix it" and boy, he did. And it was a nice sounding bass -- quite the cannon for its modest size.

Fast forward about five years. There's now some buzzy things happening so I brought the bass to the Uptons. And they deeply regret to inform me that Glenn had "really fixed" the Bittner by gluing everything together with EPOXY. The bass may buzz a bit but it could probably float across a pond without sinking.

I decided to invest the effort in having the Uptons remove all the epoxy and restore the bass properly. Their photo-essay is here. Uncounted blades were ground down by that goop, friends. But at the end, the bass was in one piece and sounding better than ever.

Post-script: I ran into Glenn some months later. "How about that epoxy?" I sez. He looked a little sheepish, then he said, "Give it up! How many good years did you get out of that thing anyway?" That was the end of our last conversation.
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