Restored bass (long post)

When I was about 17, I got a bass for Christmas from my Dad. He bought it in Pat Dolan's in Celtic Park on the northside of Dublin, and I think it cost £99. I didn't know enough at the time to realise that the neck was warped, and it buzzed really badly at the 11th fret or above on the E string, but we were in a grindcore band called Pigmeat, so it didn't really matter. It got covered in stickers, used and abused for a couple of years, and then ended up in the attic.

I don't know what make it was. It's obviously a P Bass copy, but the logo was worn (or removed) from the headstock. As a joke, I had hand painted a silver Fender logo on it after I got it (I didn't know back then that putting Fender logos on other brands was a thing). For some reason, I have it in my mind that it was an Encore, but there's nothing to identify it anywhere now. One weird thing is that it has a white plastic tab on the back, right behind the bridge. I don't know what this is for, and I've never seen it on another bass, except for one I came across in a post on TalkBass that looked identical to mine, where the owner was trying to identify the model. The consensus there was that it was Japanese, but no-one was more specific than that.

Here it is in action in the Earl Grattan on Capel St in 1993 (I was the singer, and my mate Martin actually played the bass in the band). Out minor claim to fame that night was that Smiley Bolger happened to be in the audience (he was also a neighbour of ours) and gave us a mention on The Beatbox on RTE 2 the next day.



Anyway, life moved on, and the bass came with me westwards, but wasn't played, and just sat quietly in the attic. Recently, I decided to take it down and do it up.

Here it is seeing the light for the first time in nearly 20 years:





You can see the weird plastic knob in this one:



The pickguard was smashed, the bridge was rusted, the electronics were shot - wires disconnected and scratchy pots. The pickups weren't working. The fret board was coming off the neck at the 12th fret. The knobs were missing. As I mentioned, the neck was badly warped, and it turned out that that the truss rod was gone - it wouldn't adjust at all.

So, in a project that defied any notion of economic sense, I decided to clean up and repair the bass. The stickers and newspaper cuttings were all yellowed and held on with perished Sellotape, so they all came off and I polished up the body best I could. I bought a Fender bridge, Fender pickups, Fender knobs, CTS pots, nice cloth wire and a new jack. I took a chance that a Fender '57 Precision Bass gold gold anodized pickguard would fit, and it did. The neck was beyond my skills to repair. I didn't want to splash out on a very expensive replacement, but I found one with a rosewood board, Graphtec nut and blocks for a reasonable price. The neck is a lot less chunky than the original

So here's the end result:



The part of me that's still 17 wishes I could have kept the stickers, but the rest of me has moved on from that.

I still need to put a string tree on, and I want to get some kind of custom decal done up, but it plays well (for my limited abilities), looks good and was a fun project bringing a Christmas gift from 23 years ago back to life.