Here's an odd and likely-to-be longwinded story.
In 1987 I purchased a fire engine red Pedulla Buzz Bass from Terminal Music on W.48th St. I remember the sale well. I was playing a musical on W.47th St and had just finished a Wednesday matinee. I had 2.5 hours to kill before the evening performance. Matinee days always had the potential to be dangerously expensive. Unless there was a movie I wanted to see the alternative was to spend that time lurking in the stores on Music Row, often making impulse buys on crap I later regretted.
That day was an exception. I took the Pedulla back to the theater and used it that night in one of the songs. It sounded awesome. The Pedulla quickly became a second bass I brought to every gig. Those were the days of Pino Palladino so fretless paired with a chorus and a little DDL was a popular sound.
I've got two basses which have never needed their truss rods adjusted despite NYC's heat and humidity extremes. One is my 1986 Sadowsky and the other is the Pedulla. Two years ago I decided to have profressional maintenance done on all my basses. I didn't have any issues with them -- it was more like a wellness visit to the doctor. I took my two P basses to a post-Music Row store that had once had a great service department. $500 later, I wasn't impressed with their work. In some respects they played worse than before. So I invested in the few tools and Youtube training I needed to do that maintenance work myself. I would encourage others to do likewise. It took like half an hour to get both basses where I like them.
That investigation landed me here on TalkBass, among other sites, looking for tips/tricks to maintain a Pedulla. It's where I read that I needed an autoharp or dulcimer wrench to adjust the truss rod. In fact, I did a rather poor investigation of the Pedulla itself and just took it as a matter of faith that I couldn't adjust the Pedulla's truss rod without this weird wrench. I saw that there was an odd-looking brass nut in the headstock but my close-up vision isn't as good as it used to be. I saw a brass nut and I knew that it was a soft metal that shouldn't be touched without the correct tool.
I don't recall this wrench being supplied with the Pedulla but assumed I probably lost it. So I found a nominal 4mm autoharp wrench on eBay. It didn't fit. Dammit. Using the illuminating spyglass widget on my phone I did a close inspection of the nut in that pocket. I saw that it was just a wierdly-shaped but otherwise conventional 5/16" hex nut! I have large socket sets for both metric and imperial. It's definitely 5/16, not 1/4, and it's definitely a hex nut (pic included).
So my question is, did Pedulla briefly experiment with a more conventional truss rod nut?
