This is a Stude model. It has an ambrosia maple top and bottoms with a walnut core. The neck is mahogany, maple and purpleheart. The fingerboard is purpleheart. The ambrosia maple shows some very nice spalting and figuring. There is had a fairly large cavity on the lower horn that required filling, along with the normal worm holes associated with ambrosia. All of this adds to the over cool affect of the finish.
First step was to remove the lacquer finish, which I can tell didn’t take any prisoners. The finish may not have looked pretty but it certainly was trying to stay on the wood! As I suspected the wood on the lower horn was rather more rotten than it looked so I decided to reshape the horn to account for lost wood. After that and seeing the potential of the overall bass I decided to make it a much more complex refinish and ‘set about’ the bass and expose and shape some of that walnut core.
I’m very happy with the results, which really take this instrument into a new level.
Once the bass had been fine sanded the cavities in the wood were filled using black lacquer and the bass was sealed and finished with Tru-Oil to a high gloss. This involved several sand backs during the process and a rub with 0000 steel wool before the bass was buffed. The purpleheart fingerboard was leveled, radiussed (9.5”), polished and oiled. A side jack input was added to clean up the front a little and a cavity cover, made from curly maple was completed, sealed and finished. The control, p-up cavity and back of the cavity cover were then shielded using copper
The final steps were to refit the pick-up and attach the new wiring harness complete with a six setting varitone. A new nut and bridge were cut from ebony and tuner and Schaller straplocks and a couple of ebony control knobs were fitted. After being restrung the nut was marked and slotted and the final set up was completed.
#1119 is definitely one of the nicest to date; in looks, feel, playability and sound.