Been a while….hope to do some more posts this weekend. But in the mean time…….

Check out my new-to-me mid/late 60’s Klira Twen Star 356:

I bought it with these old tapewound strings on it. Haven’t had a bass with tapewounds in over ten years…..forgot how cool they are. The neck on this bass is awesome, and plays like a dream. Plus the bass has 40 solid years of player wear - naturally ‘reliced’.

This bass sounds great unplugged. The quality of the craftsmanship really comes through in the acoustic sound. This particular model has a bolt-on neck, so now I’d really like to try one of the earlier set-neck models.

Unfortunately the electronics and pickup rings are shot. I know for sure that the neck pickup works, and the bridge pickup reads 7.5k on the multimeter, so it should be okay. The pots, switch and jack will need replacing.

A cool thing about these basses (which I didn’t know until a TalkBasser pointed it out and I pulled off the control panel) is that the pickup leads where wired to 1/8″ mono plugs. The control panel and electronics were assembled, and the volume pot was integrated with two jacks. Once it came time to assemble the bass, the pickups were mounted and simply plugged into the control panel before the panel was screwed into the body. Pretty smart…….

So if you know of somewhere I can pickup a few spare Klira pickup rings, let me know!