too much wood ?

[Adrian Levi]

I wonder if anyone give me a little advice on my 7/8 French bass (most build characteristics seem to point to it being French).

I had this bass ' repaired' by someone a while back who used overly long whole linen strips to hold cracks in the top together.
Unfortunately too much stress caused by the linen (glued in a perfect line parallel to the grain) opened a nice long new crack and so I decided to open the bass up and do a relatively simple repair by removing the linen ,cleaning ,re-gluing and cleating the top where needed.

I have not played this bass for a while as the sound although loud , just never quite did it for jazz , it always was 'quite' good with a bow but for pizz was pretty thumpy , dark and unalive .

On closer inspection I saw the back had started to come off and so I decided to start by taking the back off first , especially seeing that whoever took it off before me did not glue it back 100% straight.

When I looked inside I was really surprised to see the size of the lining in the c bouts on the back side of the bass were 10mm thick and about 5mm thick all round the rest of the bass . All the linings including the thick ones mentioned are about 35mm wide . Also the linings were wedged tightly into the edges of the corner blocks.

The corner blocks are elaborately carved to 'take' the extra fat lining as you can see by the pictures . The corner blocks are also very wide and do cover a substantial part of the actual c-bout ribs . I have already removed the back linings as I feel that they are too big and must be cut down.

The bass is very well carved and the wood is of a very good grade (maple back and ribs), but I feel that there is simply too much wood on this instrument for it to vibrate. Any advice would be great....