Work On Your Bass
Save A Gretsch Like Me
Bass Player art director Patrick Wong recently bought his first bass—a used Gretsch Electromatic (Fig. 1). Patrick knew it was a fixer-upper, and he called me for some advice on repairing the nut—a chunk of the molded plastic had broken off at the E-string slot (Fig. 2). Patrick’s other complaint was that part of the plastic volume knob was also broken.
I offered to fix the volume knob and cut Patrick a new nut from bone (I don’t reglue broken nuts). As it turned out, by the time the bass arrived, there was more work in store for me. The peghead and a section of fingerboard suffered a large, but clean, break during shipping. This can happen if you use an inadequate shipping box or don’t pack an instrument very carefully—or if you leave the strings at pitch during shipping. Patrick learned his lesson, I’m sure. It’s worth it to take the time to find a strong, well-made cardboard shipping box such as those used by the most popular manufacturers—Gibson, Martin, Guild, Taylor, etc. If you have a soft case or gig bag, reinforce the box with extra-stiff cardboard or scraps of low-grade q" plywood.
So, what would have been a piece-of-cake job became a bit more complicated. Here’s how I fixed Patrick up:
Fig. 3 The neck was built from a piece of maple about an inch thick—thick enough to make a Fender-style slab neck and peghead, but not a traditional angled peghead. To provide the peghead angle that this bass has, the neck blank is sawn at the desired peghead angle (this one is about 12 degrees), and then the cut-off piece is flipped over, and the blank is glued back together—providing the angle. This type of joint is called a “scarf joint” (don’t ask me why). The peghead broke clean along the scarfed glue joint.
After scraping off the factory glue from both mating surfaces, I chose Gorilla Glue for the job—it’s strong and has a reasonably long “open time,” i.e., the time you have for positioning and clamping before the glue starts to cure.
Fig. 4 I used wood cauls to keep the clamps from marring the neck or fingerboard.
Fig. 5 After overnight drying, I scraped away the leftover dried glue with a single-edge razor blade. Then I sanded the area with 400- and 600-grit Fre-Cut (non-loading) sandpaper.
The sanding—even though slight and with fine sandpaper—removed some of the finish from the repaired area. I could replace the finish with superglue, using the same techniques that I described last month (in which I applied a finish on a fretless fingerboard), or I could simply wipe on a few coats of Bulls Eye French polish. I chose the latter method. Bulls Eye is a shellac-based wipe-on finish that builds fast and can produce a dull, satin finish or a high gloss.
Fig. 6 The broken knob was missing about half of the plastic from the hole that fits over the potentiometer shaft.
Fig. 7 That was a super-easy fix. First, using common furniture-and-floor paste wax, I heavily waxed a 15/64" drill bit, which seemed to match the size of the hole in the plastic knob. (If you don’t have a drill bit handy, you can wax the pronged shaft of a potentiometer and use that for this job.) Then I pressed the drill bit into the hole, and I ladled in just enough black superglue to replace the missing plastic—I applied the superglue in several applications so that the glue wouldn’t “skin over” and remain soft and wet under a dried surface. I waited one hour between each layer of glue, and 20 minutes after each application, I used a little superglue accelerator on the glue to speed its curing time. Once the final coat of glue had dried, the knob pulled free from the potentiometer (thanks to the wax), and I was able to reinstall it on Patrick’s bass perfectly.
Finally, I made a new nut from bone and adjusted the bass’s action and intonation—routine jobs in any repair shop.
Next month I’ll show you how I packed the bass for its return trip—in fact, it’s how I pack every bass that passes through my shop if the owner’s packing isn’t up to my standards.
