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1986 Yamaha Motion MBII bass [8.0 lbs] :: setup

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1986 Yamaha Motion MBII bass [8.0 lbs] :: setup

I'm lucky to have a great bassist that is always bringing me interesting basses he picks up.  Here is an 80's Yamaha 4 string in for while-you-wait setup.  The player likes super-low electric guitar action so it's always a fun challenge to see how low you can go.  Working with this player has made me totally rethink my approach to bass setups.

Check out the round over on the treble-side horn - the pearl white finish flashes slight pink in certain light.  Really subtle and very cool.  Also the bridge is a unique design that I have not seen before, but the head stock really got my attention.  I don't know why, but this folded head stock looks killer!

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Tuners & feedback :: 2012 Epiphone Casino NA [6.4 lbs]

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Tuners & feedback :: 2012 Epiphone Casino NA [6.4 lbs]

A good customer brought his new-to-him Casino in for a little work.  We swapped out the tuners for Grover Sta-Tite open back tuners.  The mounting holes on the back lined up, but I had to play around with the bushings.  Normally with press-in bushing tuners, I keep the original bushing in the headstock and install the new tuners.  The issue was that the Grover tuner posts were a hair too large to fit the bushings.  So you would think that I could just swap out the original bushings for the Grover ones, right?  Nope.  The Grover bushings were too small to stay in the headstock so I had to remove the original bushings, ream out the inside diameter of the bushings and re-install.  Ah the joys of modding import guitars: replacing metric components with mis-matched imperial unit hardware.

The player was also having feedback issues with the full hollow / P90 design of the Casino.  An inexpensive fix was to stuff black foam inside the f-holes to help reduce the sensitivity of the body.  Oddly enough, the foam I used was from my stash of foam that Stewmac uses to package Waverly tuners.

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Sloppy Gibson Deluxe tuners :: 1993 Gibson J-100

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Sloppy Gibson Deluxe tuners :: 1993 Gibson J-100

Here's a common issue with Gibson Deluxe tuners.  The tuner button shafts eventually work against the tuner housing and loosen up the back cover.  These covers have metal tabs that are pressed into the base plate and then deformed to lock in with a mechanical connection (similar to a rivet).  I have tried soldering these tabs in the past but they never seem to hold for very long.  This time I tried a flat screwdriver and a hammer to punch the tab and reform it to hold in to the base plate.  We'll see how long this method will work. I may try a combination of this and soldering on future repairs.  See the video below from the daily vlog.

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