DiPinto Guitars

A customer brought in a 70’s Gibson EB-2 for a neck reset. I rarely see these come apart. Maybe it was heat or moisture. There was no movement in the neck joint and the neck was cemented into a bad tilt with that noticeable gap at the heel join, which makes me think it heated up in a hot car or something and then cooled in a bad position.
I removed the big chrome neck pickup and that large route allowed me to get my drill bit in there to make some pilot holes for my heating elements. Then I mounted my “neck pusher outer” I made out of some spindle clamps and a 2x4. It clamps to the body and pushes on the heel of the neck. I just kept increasing the pressure with the wing nuts until the neck slowly tilted out. Nerve-racking stuff, but you gotta be brave!
It came off very smoothly. Surprising I did not find a lot of glue to clear out, which could’ve been part of the problem. I stripped it all off and then I used the original strap button screw to mount it again. There was still a gap though!
I decided to fill the original strap button hole in the dovetail and redrill it with the neck in the proper position- with no gap. That did the trick. I also opted for a longer strap button screw this time. A couple of clamps to couple with the screw and some wood glue and the thing was back in action.
The angle was perfect and the cosmetics were beautiful. No real setup needed! What a cool bass and now it’s ready for more subsonic woofer frequencies!

Working on the 4th bass I ever made. Custom made for Jamaaladeen Tacuma back in 1998. This is the second bass I made for Jamaal, the first one can be seen in the third to last frame. This particular one ids a neck-thu Belvedere with and sparkle plastic back, fancy pickguard and big sparkle thumb nail inlay. The custom chrome pickup cover was made to hide the EMG active P-bass pickup. We were going for full retro look with a hidden hi-fi tone under the hood. The last frame shows the electronics. There is a guitar pickup used as a choke to cut lows and a hidden preset volume pot for jumping quickly to a lower volume level.
Over the years of heavy touring some of the inlays fell out and the tailpiece broke. I made new inlays and propped up the customized jazz tailpiece and now it’s back for more “free form funky freekquencies”

A wild handmade 6 string bass banjo came in for repair. The maker, who did a wonderful build, seems to have had trouble finding the correct pickup to amplify it. There was a long thin piezo mounted under the saddles, but that didn’t have any bass response. They also tried a K&K with 3 elements mounted in different areas, which would have worked beautifully but with the way the bridge was designed, there was almost no vibration happening at the bridge itself. The bass was designed with a bridge that was isolated from the rest of the instrument except for the end that was connected to the neck. This essentially turned it into a Steinberger style bass with a very fancy banjo body built around it merely for esthetics. This is great if you want the look of a banjo but no resonance. This was probably done to kill feedback. But piezo pickups only pick up vibration and there wasn’t much going on here (acoustically, the bass is very quiet)
I experimented with a Strat coil hovering over the strings and found that a magnetic pickup was a better option. But space below the strings was limited. So I hit up and he made me a wafer thin coil out of a refrigerator magnet. It rates at around 4.5k. Very cool!
I built a rosewood case for it and topped it with a piece of exotic wood veneer.
Everything worked beautifully except the refrigerator magnet wasn’t quite strong enough to give the push necessary for decent output. I added 2 ferrite magnets from some old DiPinto pickups and the volume increased dramatically. I was happy to find that there was just enough room to make it all fit.
A wild bass that now actually has bass frequencies when amplified!