ColinJ - One Note Wonder!
Well, I can't actually answer your questions, but...
I fantasised about learning to play the bass about 30 years ago so I bought a Rickenbacker bass and a Marshall bass amp off a mate of mine. He didn't have any spare speakers so I looked around for something suitable and in the meantime, the bass gathered dust...
Anyway, about that time my then girlfriend decided to dump me and this resulted in a lot of turgid emotional angst which needed to be dissipated somehow. I could either go out and find another young woman to dump it all on, or be more civilised and take up a hobby instead. Romance was clearly dead, so I chose woodwork...
Off I scooted down to my local electronics shop and there I bought a book of plans for bass bins ranging in size from
pretty chunky to
BIG BASTARD. Since my ego was at an all-time low I decided that I'd build Big Bastard, a kind of musical equivalent to buying a blood-red Ferrari to pose in.
I bought a couple of sheets of 8' x 4' plywood at trade price from the factory I worked at and scrounged a lift back with them in the company van. My parents occupied the room at the front of the house, and my sisters had left home by then so I had the dining room at the rear of the house to myself. It would make a fine workshop!
I saw a 200 watt 15" Gauss speaker for sale in the local small ads and picked that up for £75. After a couple of weeks of sawing, screwing and glueing, I'd built the shell of the bin. The difficult thing was making the big flared horn in the top front of the bin. I cleverly constructed a set of wooden struts which acted as formers for the flare of the horn. I bent a series of layers of thin plywood over these and glued them into place. I covered the bin in that black PVC/leathery material that all self-respecting PA speakers are clad with, and topped it off with chunky chromed corner protectors. The horn was painted a lurid shade of orange, vaguely reminiscent of the colour of Johhny Rotten's hair. It looked pretty damn
good!
I wired in the speaker, secured the back panel of the bin and switched on the Marshall amp to warm-up. It was a valve amp of course, and needed a while to get up to a decent working temperature. Being young and foolish, I searched in vain for '11' on the volume control, but in the end I settled for a mere '10'.
Time for lift off... 'Anarchy in the UK' blasting out of my hifi, I strapped on the Rickenbacker and plucked one string as hard as I could...
F***in' Hell 
!!!!!!!!!!!!! A vase fell off the sideboard and smashed at my feet. My mother came rushing in from the other room looking ashen-faced and mouthing something which I couldn't quite make out because of a sound like a jumbo jet landing next to me. Apparently, neighbours' pets were having spontaneous involuntary bowel movements upto 200 metres away and pigeons were dropping dead from the skies... I leapt across the room, turned off the amp and ended my bass-playing career there-and-then...
I decided that I wasn't cut out for that deaf stage-strutting malarkey so a few days later I sold the amp and guitar back to my mate (at a big loss
) and wondered what to do next. I actually thought having a home-made black and orange bass bin monolith in the centre of the room was pretty cool, like something out of 2001 - a Space Odyssey, but my folks were pretty adamant that it had to go
. Reluctantly, I let it be known to the local musical community, that the Coventry branch of BassBinsRUs had one too many in stock...
And so it came to pass that the following Sunday, a battered old transit van full of Rastas pulled up outside the ancestral home. Ganja Smoke was pouring out of the windows. It looked like a scene from a Cheech & Chong movie...
The Rastas trooped through to the
landing strip dining room and broke out in applause when they saw the bin. Shucks, it was only a little something that I'd knocked up the week before...
They agreed to buy the bin at a price which would yield me a handsome profit so at least my hard work had not been in vain. Between four of us we picked up the bin and staggered towards for the doorway with it, only to find that it was too damn big to go through the gap - shiiiiiiiiiiit
! It hadn't occurred to me when I was building the thing, that one day it would have to be moved...
The Rastas went back to the van to share a spliff, while I got to work with my tape measure. It looked as though the speaker was exactly the same width as the doorway, at least it would be once the door was out of the way! I got to work with my trusty screwdriver and removed the dining room door. I had to take the telephone shelf off a wall in the hall because it was also sticking out too far. The Rastas returned for round 2. My measurements were accurate and the bin wedged firmly in place. Bugger! I knew that I'd get some stick from my dad for this, but there was nothing for it but to force the bass bin through, scraping great swathes of paint off the door frame in the process. Eventually we got the thing out to the van and I got my hands on the loot - yessssss!
I never heard the bin in action but apparently the band were sonically attacking audience members all over the midlands for years with it
And the moral of this story is - always ensure that anything you build indoors is smaller than the biggest exit route
!
