Repairs included: a fret level/dress, cobbed replacement saddles (4) for the bridge, replacement neck binding (a real odd shape), modding the bridge plate to allow more adjustment room of the bridge's travel, wiring cleaning, un-plugging filled holes in the headstock and adding/moving-around the tuners, a new bone nut, cleaning, and a ton of fuss setting it up. That's even more impressive on this character due to all the excess tension from the extra strings.
They're all super-thin and '80s-hair-band fast, true and straight, and have truss rods that work like a charm. I've never had an old Hagstrom through with a dodgy neck so far.
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I also want to really hand it to the engineers at Hagstrom of the '60s - those folks knew how to build stable, accurate necks. If you up-pick with your fingers, the strings start their attack with the thicker bass strings rather than the octaves, yielding a mellower "12-string" vibe to the sound - sort-of like you're getting thicker overtones or using a really mild octave pedal on a normal bass. That's all played with a flatpick, mind you, guitar-style. It not only sounds like the world's best bajo sexto, if you stick it in "bridge only" position it would make a killer instrument to fill a "bartione 12-string" role. I love the sound of it, though, especially through those clear/punchy Hagstrom single coil pickups. It needed a lot of help, though, and a lot of tweaking to get it playing right. I've never handled the real thing before so I was excited the moment he dropped it off. I finally got that time to fix it and on the other side of repairs this beast is so dang cool. You see, it looked simple on the surface - replace some neck binding, add four tuners at the headstock, and reconvert it back into an 8-string bass from the 4-string it'd been modded to at the factory - but anyone with a trained eye for instrument repair knows that an 8-string bass is a creature that requires time to solve. It sat and sat and sat and grew cold, weary, and dejected as I continued to ignore it. My friend Wayne dropped this Swedish-made Hagstrom off eons ago for repair.
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