I bought this bass thinking it was a 1984 Series I. While there were a number of things wrong with it, serial number or year discrepancies were not among its problems.
When I was considering buying it, I called Alembic and spoke to Mica and she was able to pull its build card just fine. After seeing comments in this thread about the serial number stamping, and talking with Thomas about it, something really wasn’t sitting right with me. I was sure this was 843115 when I had it!! After thinking about it earlier today I realized that the most likely point in time for something to go wrong was when it was refretted. Chicago FretWorks did an amazing job with the frets, but they were the only people to work on it. I realized that when they had the frets out they likely dressed the fretboard and I realized, “maybe they made the numbers a little light when they sanded it and re-stamped them with good intentions.” I talked myself out of that… “nah, they would’ve said something!!”… but I couldn’t shake it. I stopped by after work today and the owner assured me they’d never do that - he didn’t even think they had the number punches to do it! After I left, I called Thomas to let him know and not five minutes into the conversation Chicago FretWorks called me and said they did it after all. When he took the bass in, he made a mistake and wrote down 853115. The tech took pictures “before” working and clearly it was 843115. At some point, he realized he sanded away some of the numbering and restamped it according to the owner’s intake notes with the wrong serial number.
So, that’s how this happened. Chicago FretWorks said they’ll correct it and I’ll work with Thomas to make sure this gets resolved. I’ve suggested that Thomas should send it home to Alembic for the RF upgrade and to have Alembic set the serial number right at the same time. This bass has had a wild journey with a whole lot of story, but i loved it as well as I could and Thomas is taking great care of it now.
