retiring the old battleaxe
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Photo of an electric bass -- Peavey T-45 -- propped up against a wall. Light from a window is reflected off the shiny surface of the body. The frets are missing and the remaining lines are barely visible. You can feel the weight simply by its presence.
Heavy af, been through some shit, tbh it looks and plays better than it ought to. But I'm old and can't get on with anything that doesn't have a compact body, so it's going to have to be Soundgears and similar for me from now on lest I have a couple days' of shoulder pain every time I pick something up to noodle around.
A previous owner pulled the frets and then tried to play it like a bluesman, there were ruts a couple mm deep in the board when I bought it, gouged out by steel roundwounds. Excellent repair and refinishing (incl some kind of hardening surface on the fingerboard) by the techs at Elderly Instruments rescued it. There's probably not enough wood in the fingerboard if it has to all be resurfaced again, but it doesn't look like it should be necessary either -- as long as the string paths get dressed it'll be fine for a while yet. It still has its truss rod cover, it was off for this photo because I was fiddling with the action a bit.
The T-45 is the lesser-known and rarer sibling of the T-40 that got popular among the retro set in the past few years. If the T-40 can be thought of as Peavey crossing a Jazz Bass with a Swiss army knife, this would be a Precision with a little extra hot sauce: Not as versatile but doesn't have a single baked-in sound to it either.
So I hate to put it on the market, partly for sentimental reasons since I've had it for almost 30 years, and partly because the used instrument market is tanking right now for exactly the reasons you can imagine it might. Sic transit gloria boatanchor.
A previous owner pulled the frets and then tried to play it like a bluesman, there were ruts a couple mm deep in the board when I bought it, gouged out by steel roundwounds. Excellent repair and refinishing (incl some kind of hardening surface on the fingerboard) by the techs at Elderly Instruments rescued it. There's probably not enough wood in the fingerboard if it has to all be resurfaced again, but it doesn't look like it should be necessary either -- as long as the string paths get dressed it'll be fine for a while yet. It still has its truss rod cover, it was off for this photo because I was fiddling with the action a bit.
The T-45 is the lesser-known and rarer sibling of the T-40 that got popular among the retro set in the past few years. If the T-40 can be thought of as Peavey crossing a Jazz Bass with a Swiss army knife, this would be a Precision with a little extra hot sauce: Not as versatile but doesn't have a single baked-in sound to it either.
So I hate to put it on the market, partly for sentimental reasons since I've had it for almost 30 years, and partly because the used instrument market is tanking right now for exactly the reasons you can imagine it might. Sic transit gloria boatanchor.
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The weight is under 11 lbs though -- pretty heavy but not actually out of line for a late 70s-early 80s US-made bass. Everybody was building boat anchors in those days, even Fender.
I've seen people complain about failing to sell basses online, but on the other hand i was able to sell a guitar amp on consignment within a couple of weeks and did ok (i was on the low end of most similar Reverb listings).