Quote from: CynthiaAnn on April 20, 2019, 09:32:47 AM
Just adding my 89' Carvin 5 string to this post. This is my "go to" for gigging....it's 30 this year, and part of my soul...
C
Cool! I just got rid of my PRS 7-string recently - I needed to pay for a refret job on my Taylor 12-string.
Unfortunately, due to a severe allergy to nickel (almost all guitar frets are nickel alloy), and chromium (which is a major component of stainless steel), that was discovered in 2014, when I ended up with mega dermatitis (it was all over my body, and according to one of my coworkers, I looked like a burn victim), I have to have all of my guitars refretted with Jescar EVO Gold hypoallergenic fret wire. It ain't cheap to do (anywhere from 300-$450 per guitar), so when it became a choice of not refretting the 12-string (which I play in the church band) or getting rid of the PRS 7-string to afford the refret, the 7-string went bye-bye. No more Fear Factory for me!
Oh well, I still have the Fender 60s Baja Tele, and my Gibson ES-137 (which reminds me a lot of the Gibson Howard Roberts Fusion that was my main gigging guitar in the 90s) - I learned my lesson when I got rid of my first ES-137, and my first 60s Baja Tele, those two are going nowhere!! Besides, they've already been refretted. As for the 12-fret Blueridge 000-size Martin clone, I'm in no hurry to get it refretted yet, since it isn't played as much as the other guitars are, and I can't afford to cough up another $350 to get it refretted. As it is, I can still play it, just not for extended periods of time.
It sucks to have to get your guitars refretted due to allergies. Due to the expense (and lack of expertise to do it myself), the days of cheap thrills guitars are over with (I can't justify spending as much as a guitar cost, to have it refretted). But it was do that, or give up playing after playing for more than 35 years (at the time the allergy was discovered in 2014). You should have seen the fun I had finding electric guitar strings that were both nickel and stainless steel free! Out of 200 or so electric guitar string product lines, I only found two that met my criteria - Rotosound British Steels (which are made out of plain old steel), and Ernie Ball Cobalts (which are made from cobalt alloy). I went with Ernie Ball Cobalts, due to the larger variety of string gauges you can get them in, compared to the British Steels. To make sure, I e-mailed Ernie Ball, who confirmed to me that they are basically hypoallergenic strings.
I need to take a photo of my guitar family. It's been a couple of years since I've done so. I'm finally at the point where I'm satisfied gear-wise, after selling off all of my pro-level guitar gear in the late 90s to help pay for transition costs. It sure took enough trial and error (part of which was due to the experimentation [some of which was successful, some, not so successful] of buying and using guitars that were different from what I played pre-transition).
Cynthia - are you aware that Carvin renamed their guitar division to Keisel (after the name of the oldest of the Carvin brothers)? BTW, your bass that used to be a skate board - it reminds me of the Skatetar that Drew Blades of The Surf Punks used to play. He'd roll onstage on it, pick it up and and proceed to to play the first few songs of the show with it!
Ellen - I REALLY need to go to bed!
