Bass VI ... I'm actually bringing a '64 Hofner Model 188 back to life right now. Cut and paste from my shop's Facebook site ...

Another rare bird restoration project needing a rabbit's foot for good luck. A cleanup volunteer fished this from a muddy debris pile somewhere here in town during the massive city-wide floods in 2016. The flooded out, sludged guitar then sat in the volunteer's open garage in St. Bernard Parish for the last two years, baking, festering and warping ... until a couple weeks ago when it was gifted to yours truly. It is spit-shine clean compared to how it looked when it walked in - there were live spiders under the pickguard. Oddly enough, the electronics still work and the pickups meter strong at about 8.9K each. Anyway, 99 percent of the Western guitar playing world would see this is as a hopeless heap. Fans of Hofner Guitars of Germany, however, see it as an insanely rare 1964 Hofner Model 188 28" scale six-string BASS. Pot codes date 44th week of '63. Yes, a mid-60s tremolo-equipped and baritone scale response to Fender's rare-in-its-own-right Bass VI, by Europe's equivalent of Fender and Gibson in that era. It's fair to say not many of these were made nor sold worldwide in the eight years they were shown in the Hofner product catalog. These things are so rare, I had to make up a "set" of mixed bass and guitar strings just to get proper tension on the neck. On that note, we've completed the hardest part of the job - a week-long steaming and clamping out of the worst neck warp I've seen in three decades of working on guitars. The neck was as bent as a long bow, backwards, and I'm still working on it. But it appears this thing is going to come back to life.

Since this post/photos, I've straightened out and cleaned up the neck (and refretted it with jumbos). Body is undergoing facelift as I type this. It's not getting refinned with red croc vinyl, I have another idea. So stay tuned. :)