1950 Kay M-1 Bass

(Click on any image for a larger version.)

This was Danny Romanuk's Kay M-1 Bass, 'Little Bambi', played by him on CKNW radio in Vancouver, BC with 'The Cavaliers' starting New Year's Eve 1955. It also went to the Soviet Union with 'Danny Romanuk & his Tumbleweeds' in 1963, the first band from the west to play behind the Iron Curtain.

This bass had a cracked bass bar and had been burdened with a thick, gloopy coat of polyurethane finish. The neck had also bent forward under years of string pressure and needed straightening & some reinforcement.

The interior was in very nice shape for a 57 year old ply bass with just the usual collection of dust bunnies.

Only a few of the linings were detached and there was one pressure fracture in the upper rib.

The spruce neck block was intact with no cracks, just the usual hide glue squeezed out from the factory assembly process.

I made a new bass bar from hand-split quartersawn old Sitka Spruce and fitted it with hot hide glue.

This bass bar has straight grain, no run-out & rings like a bell when tapped.

There were many chips around the edges that needed to be re-glued.

You can never have too many clamps!

You can see here how opaque the added finish looks.

The extra weight was really damping the sound.

Maiken scraping and sanding off the thick, gooey polyurethane and the thin, crisp lacquer beneath it.

There were myriad dents and bumps in the edges of this well-travelled bass. We decided to fix only the biggest, smooth off the smallest & leave the rest as hard-earned battle scars.

Kay necks are quite small and very flexible without the fingerboard attached.

After clamping it straight, I inlaid a 1/4" x 1/2" carbon fibre reinforcement in the neck, to keep it that way for the next 50 years.

A stiffer neck seems to help an instrument's high frequency production as well as keeping the fingerboard camber stable.

After cleaning up the neck & refitting the dovetail, it is ready to be glued to the refurbished body.

While it was out, I took the opportunity to re-set the neck angle to increase the bridge height a little.

While the bass was apart, I drilled out the heavy steel tuner shafts and filled the centres with wood instead.

The tuners went from 820 grams to 690, a noticeable difference. Combined with the 265 gram aluminium and carbon fibre Norton endpin, the bass lost 375 grams of steel, more than 3/4 of a pound.

The bass was stained with a custom colour to match the original aged finish & then sprayed with satin lacquer to give it an appropriate vintage look.

Beautifully flamed maple that had been obscured for years under an ugly, tone robbing finish. The sides have some bird's eye mixed in with the flame!

The bass has a much bigger sound after this work.

The lighter components have made the sound a lot punchier and the bass more responsive to the player.

I also mode-matched the new curly maple tailpiece to the neck to really bring out the bottom end of the instrument.

You can really feel the bass in the floor now. :)

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