Up next thru The LowDown Repair shop is a real cool, vintage bass. The Gibson Grabber is a very unique instrument that I had never played and was real excited to check out. This one came from a multi instrumentalist/band director buddie of mine Donnie. He wanted to swap out the stock bridge for something nicer and the bass also needed a new set of strings and some general TLC. Normally, I would advise against replacing stock hardware on a collectible, vintage piece of gear like this, but since the bridge cover was already missing I figured it wouldn't affect the potential re sale of this instrument anyways. Plus, Donnie assured me he had no interest in selling this thing in the near future anyways. Other than the bridge swap I asked if he wanted anything else done. He preferred the feel and sound of the worn frets and the vintage mojo all over the bass. The Grabber features a pickup that is mounted to a piece of plastic that is moveable to get different pickup locations on the fly. Donnie had recently repaired the broken sliding piece so I knew that it was good to go. So really my job was just to make it feel as good as possible without changing much other than the bridge.
I started by taking off the 3 strings that were on the bass and the stock bridge.
This thing was pretty dirty so i went about cleaning it. The normal finish cleaner I use was a little harsh for the worn finish so I used rubbing alcohol and a lot of elbow grease. Then I followed it up with some Howards Feed N Wax to polish things up. Then I pretty much took the same approach with the fretboard and hit the neck with the usual scotchbrite/Howards combo. Then I took off the pickguard and pickup combo and noticed the bridge ground was not attached. Moved all that stuff off to the side and started on bridge placement.
We decided to go with a BadAss II bridge because of it's good reputation, look and solid overall build quality. Unfortunately this would mean this bass would not have the string thru body option anymore but the ferrules and the general area of where the strings were passing thru the back of the body was a mess on the bass, so better to just bypass it all together. I taped of the general area and measured out the proper placement.
I ended up nudging it toward the headstock a bit because I wanted it cover up as many of the original bridge holes as possible. The original calculated 34" scale placement put it a little farther back than ideal for visual reasons, but the BadAss bridge has such long intonation screws that it allows for a little more leeway than normal. Here it is with the new bridge installed and ready to go and with the pickguard and pickup re installed and bridge ground re soldered. Also was missing a pickguard screw so I threw one on.
The other main issue was the butt end strap button was stripped out. When I took it off I saw that the damage was pretty bad. It looked like someone had tried some kind of putty to fill it before so I had to strait by cleaning everything out .
Then I plugged it with a dowel and tried re drilling. Unfortunately, the plug didn't hold and tore out. The area was just too much off a mess. So I re plugged it once again and decided to redrill the hole into the original body wood slightly off center from the original strap button hole. I did that and reinstalled the button and it worked great. Wasn't too noticeable that it was off and was solid.
Then I got the bass re strung with some nice D'Addario nickels. The neck had a TON of back bow so I took the truss rod cover off and started adjusting. Got it nice and dialed in and finished the rest of the setup. Plugged it in and everything sounded great and was playing smooth. Tightened up the rest of the hardware and The Grabber was ready to go!
13. Donnie's Gibson Grabber
- Swapped stock bridge with BadAss II
- Plugged stripped strap button hole and reinstalled strap button
- Re soldered detached bridge ground wire
- Setup, re string, cleaned and tightened hardware
