Why Must I Tinker?

 Eleven sobering days have passed, and we have made some progress! I don't mean to be nostalgic, but do you remember when you could adjust your little rabbit ear antennae, tap the side of the television, and scroll from channel 2 to 13 and see somewhere between two to five NFL games on any given weekend? Now, even if you have cable (we don't) you have to subscribe to this or that streaming service for every separate game. (Grumble grumble grumpy old Gen Xer!) So I am having my own wildcard game with the ol' Harmony H-805. Here are the finalists who have made the playoffs: Original bridge Vs. stock Fender bridge from my Mustang bass. Original string tee with no string slots Vs. Silly Stew-mac roller tee. The headstock and tuners cleaned up pretty nicely, I must say. I'll go ahead and tell you, the roller bolted right on and won by a safety. And in the toughest division, Original Pickup, if it works (which also has a new sparkle) Vs. Active EMG 35-DC pickup Vs. EMG passiv...

 Before diving into the details, I just want to stress how wonderfully dirty this bass was. It even carried a mildew-type odor reminiscent of my mother's annually flooded basement. I dove in with some Simple Green and a rag, wondering how many of my old buds have picked this thing up and fiddled with it over the years as they jammed or recorded in Josh's studio. How many beers have been spilled upon thee? How much cigarette smoke has encircled thee? Some of you may think that it is wrong to clean off years of "mojo." Well, that's because you've never smelled my friends' mojo! I'm not singling anyone out, Doug. Let's start at the body and work our way to the tuners. Strap button is loose. Haven't tested the threads yet.  The bridge. The bridge! It's rusty, but actually has some height and string length adjustment to it. The Harmony six-stringer was a bridge/ashtray in one. This used to have a proprietary bolt on ashtray, which is missing. Th...

 I find it amazing when life runs in patterns peppered with coincidences. Coincidences concocted by chance. Chances challenging logic. Logic lending to tinkering. I started this blog eleven months ago to the day, merely to keep myself out of the winter funk and too-often drunk pattern I fall into when the temperatures dip. And it all started with the Harmony H-804. It turned out to be a fun little guitar. Then, in the middle of the summer it was the Peavey Patriot bass re-fret to regret. That one took awhile, because it was intermixed with travel, including several trips to my hometown, one in which I was hanging out in my friend Josh's studio and there, covered in dirt, dust, mildew and disgust, was a Harmony bass in all appearances being of the same era as the H-804. We had a few beers and marvelled at the time that has passed, and the great times we had being in a band together. I let it slip my mind, but later I had Josh send me a photo of the bass so I could put it in one of t...

Sure, post less than once a month, that's one way to keep friends engaged! I plan on wrapping this one up folks, so the next tinker post may be years from now and involve how to dig my own grave. Or how to build hidden bookshelves for a post-second civil war Christian Nationalist america.  It's been so long I can't even remember where I left off. Luckily I can go back and look at the old post! That's right, I was worried about how much fret height was filed off in the leveling process. I must say, it is just fine, but man did those frets have some flat spots! Which can lead to the same buzziness I was having with nubby frets. There is a tool, of course, which is ridiculously expensive, of course, and one guy in one YouTube video convinced me I could do it with a normal file. Of course, he is a pro and I am a guy with a bass that still has some flat spots on his frets. Oh well. Maybe I'll touch it up more, maybe I'll buy the damned file someday, but in the meanti...

 ...vs. Jamerson vs. Weymouth vs. Dixon vs. Bootsy vs. Watt. Probably Carol Kaye though. This has been a wacky summer. Almost no fishing, and when I did go I snapped my Orvis rod. Again. Almost no mountain biking, due to the daily rains mucking up the trails. Almost no music playing or practicing, due to travel and work and general house projects.  It would give me a great deal of pleasure to finish something other than replacing the wax ring of the basement toilet, so I'm going to at least get this fretless across the finish line, because it is going to be a little easier than the Peavey. The bag of plastic nuts I had for my Peavey (I will be carving out a synthetic bone for that) just so happened to fit the fretless, so with just a little filing it fit right in. A quick bolting on of the neck and I took an old set of strings and strung her up. I should state that this has the absolute worst tuners I've ever seen on a $40 bass, and that's saying something. With some lube h...

  So there are distractions, then there are things of another order, problems you drop everything to take care of no questions asked. It turned out I had to spend an extra week taking care of my mom, which butted right up to my scheduled Portland getaway with my two lifelong BMX buds.  One great thing about going home to Ohio is getting to hang with some of my old friends and bandmates, including one of my favorite humans in the world, Josh, who happens to be a kick-ass musician and owner of... What!?! The bass version of the Harmony guitar I tinkered with in posts past!?! I somehow restrained myself from begging him to sell it to me, then spending twice as much on shipping than it could possibly be worth. With the momma all straightened out and me all stressed out, I flew from Detroit to Portland remarking to the woman beside me during landing, “Wow, it’s not burning at the hands of Marxists like Fox news told me.” And it’s not. There are tent cities in all the large munici...

 What?!? Did you think I'd let a bass carcass go to waste? Remember my sacrificial lamb? Perhaps it can be resurrected! The Bass Gods work in mysterious ways. Quite a few fret pulling videos on Youtube end with a fretless conversion. There must be tens of thousands of poor basses leaning against the back of closet walls, remembering how they once had precision note-making abilities in their youth, much like I sometimes dream of once again having long lustrous locks of hair hanging in my face or trailing behind me as I sprint my BMX towards a jump.  Fretless or not, one thing all the advice had in agreement was that you did not want to leave frets out for long, because the neck would bow in their absence. I don't know how true that is, but with the summer starting and the humidity in more flux than usual, I wasn't going to risk it.  One video mentioned using polystyrene strips often used by model train hobbyists, because they flex less than wood filler or wood strips. I al...