Double Bass Anyone familiar with Arnold Schnitzer's new book?

[GretschWretch]

I should have been more clear in my post. What I had in mind when I posted was swapping fingerboards: taking a rosewood fingerboard which I already know to be suitably dressed and putting it on a better bass that has a stained white-wood fingerboard.

But as a generalization, I agree with you.

 

[DoubleMIDI]

I should have been more clear in my post. What I had in mind when I posted was swapping fingerboards: taking a rosewood fingerboard which I already know to be suitably dressed and putting it on a better bass that has a stained white-wood fingerboard.

But as a generalization, I agree with you.

If you do this, you still need to dress the board.
Also in most cases (if not all) the width of the board will be different and you need to trim the sides. And then the strings don’t reside at the same position, the string scale might be different, so the existing dressing is not optimal etc.

 

[BassFalcon]

Doublemidi is right on. There are alot of “known unknowns” and even more “unknown unknowns” involved in a fingerboard swap as you proposed without the need for trimming the edges and redressing the board etc. however, just to share what I know that may be helpful to you, in the guitar world you get yourself a knife like this,
Original Large, Guitar Repair Palette Knife - StewMac
and some water and a heat source often an alcohol lamp, and start working the knife in that joint, getting it hot and wet. Little by little. You just keep at it. The issue afterwards is that you have to clean all the glue off, and then true up that neck joint so you have a nice clean and true surface to glue the board to. You could also rig up an espresso machine machine to help you inject some steam into the joint. Possibly even drilling through the fingerboard to the depth very near the joint to apply steam deep in there, but that would essentially ruin the current fingerboard. Speaking of ruining fingerboards, If you can work up a jig and a router sled you could also just route it off. These are some methods of how it’s done with smaller instruments, I don’t imagine a double bass would be much different but I’m sure there are pitfalls I’m unaware of. As you can see, even with the smaller instruments it’s an enormous and time consuming job, rife with pitfalls. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try it though.