Bass + Hot Sun

pmckee · #1 08-07-2007, 05:58 PM

I have been playing outside a lot with my carved bass in the hot boston summer we've been having. Is this completely insane? I want to make sure it isn't hurting my bass in any way. My bridge is starting to warp, but I am pretty sure it began to do so before I started busking with my friends. I think my bass came with a marginal bridge anyway. Any info would be great. Thanks.
Pat

drurb · #2 08-07-2007, 06:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pmckee

I have been playing outside a lot with my carved bass in the hot boston summer we've been having. Is this completely insane? I want to make sure it isn't hurting my bass in any way. My bridge is starting to warp, but I am pretty sure it began to do so before I started busking with my friends. I think my bass came with a marginal bridge anyway. Any info would be great. Thanks.
Pat

IMO:

Carved bass+Direct sun+High humidity = Potential disaster.

Silversorcerer · #3 08-07-2007, 09:35 PM

After owning a carved bass for two years and subjecting it to all manner of abuse, I can report that mine is not as fragile as the prevailing rumors hold. However, hot sun exposure is just not good for anything if you can find a little shade. I have had mine in the sun, but the general environment was not boiling at the time. Right now, it is about 85-90 degrees F in my house depending on which room I choose to suffocate in. I sort of canceled the AC this summer. I wanted to make sure all my gear could take global warming. It's an inconvenient truth. So far so good. The gear is doing much better than I am. No truss rod nightmares, no open seams or cracks and no blown circuits. What can I say, the natural cycle runs from hot to cold every year. Perhaps it is really no big deal. But I would not leave my stuff out in the direct sun for long periods at any time of the year. What is that saying about tempting fate? I'd find some shade to busk in.

I don't think the sun would make your bridge warp though. Which direction is your bridge warping?

pmckee · #4 08-07-2007, 10:44 PM

Hey thanks for the feedback. My bridge is kind of warping in 2 directions. It goes towards the tailpiece at first glance, but if you check it out closely the top part of it is bowing towards the FB. I think at this point it's too late to do anything about so I might play this one into the ground. My teacher said it looks like a thin bridge. It came on my shen willow.

Silversorcerer · #5 08-08-2007, 10:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pmckee

Hey thanks for the feedback. My bridge is kind of warping in 2 directions. It goes towards the tailpiece at first glance, but if you check it out closely the top part of it is bowing towards the FB. I think at this point it's too late to do anything about so I might play this one into the ground. My teacher said it looks like a thin bridge. It came on my shen willow.

Hopefully the DB top errs on the thick side unlike the bridge. Less resonance, but if you are going to really put the instrument to use in all weather, thicker is safer.

Replace the warped bridge with a nice Despiau. If it is turning into an "S", it is going to fail and could cause some minor damage / denting to the top. I would not play it till it falls. I put one of those Despiau second select bridges on my bass and the grain was perfectly aligned. And I left it carved kind of thick. (My DB is also on the thick side, currently the heaviest bass listed on the "What does you bass weigh thread"). I'm sure it probably was not as loud at first with it's heavy wood, but now that I've beaten it daily for a couple of years it is stiff competition for a grand piano. Keep us up to date on how the Shen holds up under your abuse / use. I've heard these are very good instruments, so it shouldn't be hurting too bad.

Here's what a proper bridge should look like:

alanbarnosky · #6 08-08-2007, 12:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Silversorcerer

Right now, it is about 85-90 degrees F in my house depending on which room I choose to suffocate in. I sort of canceled the AC this summer. I wanted to make sure all my gear could take global warming. It's an inconvenient truth. So far so good. The gear is doing much better than I am. No truss rod nightmares, no open seams or cracks and no blown circuits.

An extra $30 a month on AC, or $2000 in bass repairs? Hmmm...

bassist1962 · #7 08-08-2007, 02:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Silversorcerer

Right now, it is about 85-90 degrees F in my house depending on which room I choose to suffocate in. I sort of canceled the AC this summer. I wanted to make sure all my gear could take global warming. It's an inconvenient truth. So far so good. The gear is doing much better than I am. No truss rod nightmares, no open seams or cracks and no blown circuits. What can I say, the natural cycle runs from hot to cold every year. Perhaps it is really no big deal.

I know this is the 21st century, and we have all these modern conveniences of climate control, but what did people do before any of this was available? How many players have basses from the 19th century back? How did these instruments manage to survive the climate changes? Maybe it really is no big deal. Just a thought.

drurb · #8 08-08-2007, 04:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bassist1962

I know this is the 21st century, and we have all these modern conveniences of climate control, but what did people do before any of this was available? How many players have basses from the 19th century back? How did these instruments manage to survive the climate changes? Maybe it really is no big deal. Just a thought.

You know, I thought about this very question after I read Silver's post. There's really no way of telling how many of the repairs that have typically been done to older basses might have been prevented had modern conveniences of climate control been available. Also, perhaps it is the case that a greater proportion of modern basses are destined to survive because we can control the climate better. I do know that luthiers fairly routinely report about repairs that could have been avoided had owners taken more care in terms of the climate in which their basses live.

Silversorcerer · #9 08-09-2007, 09:39 AM

My guess is that more basses are repaired because of "impact damage" than climate. If the wood is aged properly, it should be stable. On the other hand if you force dry it with a central forced air heating system, it is going to crack. I don't do that either. I use a humidifier in the winter. This coming winter however it will be in a new environment with radiant hydronic heating and I will not add supplemental humidity. And for my house AC would be more like $100 / month. Still, $$ has nothing to do with it in my case. Keeping an instrument in a house that gets up to 90 degrees or close is not the same as putting it in direct sun where the heat can build to well over 140 degrees.

Heat is really interesting to study. I re-cambered a bow 2 years ago using only the heat of the sun and a black plastic tube. I built a jig that compressed the bow to the shape I wanted, put a dark room thermometer in the bore of the frog end and stuck the whole assembly into a black vinyl tube and put it up on my roof in mid August. Within about an hour, the thermometer was reading 145 degrees F. I left it there for another hour and the bow was re-cambered. I had recently re-glued the bone on the bow tip also with hide glue and it didn't come off and hasn't yet.

Consider this;- If your bass was imported in a steel shipping container that plausibly sat on the deck of a barge, how hot do you think it got in that container??? What was the humidity at sea level???? If it was imported via air cargo, what was the temp and pressure at 29,000 ft. in an uncontrolled airplane cargo bay???

Mine sat in a warehouse at some Pacific port (humidity????) for two weeks or so while US customs did their drill. The box my bass came in said "Musical Instrument - Handle with care". It didn't say ship only in a refrigerated truck. Obviously, careful "handling" is the larger concern. It came to me on a truck. No special insulation in the truck, no special cushy suspension, just a truck. All the way from California to Atlanta. All the way across Texas (some of you might have visited Houston in the summer?) Arizona, etc. In a couple of days of shipping it crossed every conceivable climate zone except polar and tropical. And it probably was close to polar where it crossed the Sierra Nevadas and close to tropical if it went down I-10 through Texas.

I figure at some point, the wood needs to breath to age normally. I don't want to slow that down. If it cracks, I'll fix it. Climate control is a joke, IMO. You have to take the bass from one place to another and it inevitably is going to get exposed to temp / humidity changes in the process. Common sense would be not to leave it in the direct sun. But perhaps in the building process the ribs could be bent that way. I might try it because it definitely worked with the bow.

christ andronis · #10 08-10-2007, 12:05 PM

I've had my carved Chrissy for going on three years. It's been used outdoors, indoors, in A/C and in grossly humid rooms. The only problem I've ever had was an open seam caused by someone (read ME) put the bass down a little too hard getting it out of the car. From everything I've read, going from a humid environment to an extremely dry one quickly is what causes the most problems with wood. I know living in Chicago poses its own little micro-climates in the blink of an eye so if nothing has happened yet, I'm not going to worry about it.

drurb · #11 08-10-2007, 01:09 PM

Given that we have the opportunity with modern conveniences to control the "living" environments of our carved basses, I, for one, will continue to take advantage of them. I do not consider this to be wasteful, superstitious, or unjustified behavior given the advice I've gotten and heard from various luthiers and the reports of damage I have heard and read that resulted from prolonged exposure to less-than-favorable conditions. Yes, I might be just fine not taking the precautions I take. I think, however, that the probability of a problem developing were I were not to take them is not trivial. As far as the potentially extreme climates in which basses are shipped, it is probably of significance that they are not under the tension of strings during that time. In the end, we each strike the balance how we each see fit. To each his own.

Still, it would be nice to have a luthier chime in here.