clearly! i agree. all of my alembics have been pre-owned and i've also consulted at length w/mica about the relative good and bad points of a particular ebay-offered alembic. remember the mark king or stanley clarke or series that had the cracked tailpiece horn? one of the horns was broken off. mica gave me great advice on the various ways it could be fixed correctly. sadly, the only method that would result in the bass looking right was to remove both wings and replace them w/new ones. jesus christ, you wouldn't believe what that cost. the other alternatives were going to result in an odd appearance that no one else would probably see from a stage, but i'd know! so, i passed. it sold w/in a range i would have paid at the time, but i would have obsessed about that broken horn. when i purchased my persuader vector, both mica and dave advised me on how to bring a dried out fingerboard back to life and i took their advice and it worked. however, i'm still interested in the history aspect of the, well i guess your, exploiter. if i had won that exploiter, i was going to have someone here remove the pearl dots and try to insert plugs which would more closely match the wood. if you watch this old house on pbs, people skilled in wood can do wonders even w/old wood hundreds of years old. i was going to take it to an antiques restorer here who is really, really good and have him do it. our first step was going to be to contact alembic and see what i could do about getting a wood sample or piece that would match as closely as possible. the restorer was going to do the rest. that is a beautiful exploiter you got. wish you hadn't paid so much. like i say, seller offered it to me for $1500 before he moved into nyc and couldn't get his email back up for 2 weeks.
