1950s Sherwood (Kay) Archtop Rubber Bridge Acoustic Bass Conversion

Overview: This started-out as an old Kay-made archtop guitar that has been haunting the shop storage racks for ages. It arrived with the cut-short fretboard extension, a broken heel, missing bridge, and no real reason for revival. I had earmarked it for conversion into a rubber bridge, super-short-scale bass as soon as it arrived because I loved the color and neck feel (for a bass, anyway) and I recently spent a little time working on some conversions for customers so put it in the queue to get completed. I wanted to do something a little different this time around and made this one a "plug-in-acoustic" bass rather than fitting just a magnetic pickup and I like the upright-like, marimba-like sounds coming from this fella. It's addicting!

Interesting features: Well, of course, it's fit with the rubber bridge mod and acoustic pickups. I used 3 K&K small sensors so it's essentially fit with a K&K Pure Mini pickup. The signal from this is nice on its own, but becomes very powerful and easily-able to ape an upright-like sound when used with a good preamp or bass amp with decent EQ-tweaking abilities. The body on this is all thin ply so it has the huge advantage of being quite weather-stable and, because it's a rubber bridger with the adjustable bridge setup, I think this makes it a nice touring or gigging instrument because it'll be easy to keep it running well. The nice thing about rubber saddles of the sort I use is that the strings intonate on a straight line at exactly the scale length, so intonation issues you get with other "pocket bass" designs are not an issue on these.

Repairs included: I repaired a heel crack (two bolts, epoxy) and reset the neck, gave it a level/dress of the frets and side dots, fit older Grover tuners to the headstock and filled two of the tuner-shaft holes with pearl dots made a new bone nut, fit the pickups, made and fit a rosewood tailpiece, modified an old bridge into an adjustable, archtop-style one with a rubber-saddle top, and set it up. The strings are old nickel-wound, roundwound bass strings and I love the "bouncy" but full sound you get from roundwounds with a rubber bridge setup.

• Weight: 4 lbs 2 oz
• Scale length: 25 7/8"
• Nut width: 1 5/8"
• Neck shape: medium-bigger C/D
• Board radius: 10"
• Body width: 15 1/8"
• Body depth: 3 5/8"
• Body wood: ply spruce over ply maple
• Bridge: adjustable w/rubber saddle
• Fretboard: rosewood
• Neck wood: poplar
• Pickups: 3x K&K small sensor acoustic pickups (like Pure Mini)
• Action height at 12th fret: 3/32" bass and 1/16" treble (fast, spot-on)
• String gauges: 100w-45w or similar nickel-wound bass strings
• Neck relief: straight
• Fret style: medium/lower

Condition notes: The heel has a big repaired crack (it's going nowhere -- very strong but ugly) and someone cut-down the fretboard extension by a few frets at some point. The tuners are replacements. There's light-to-medium usewear throughout the body and neck (in a nice, lovingly-used sort-of way). 

It comes with: Sorry, no case.

Consignor tag: JW/CCG