April Birthdays 
I bought what I believe is a 25-year-old KuroKumo-made Mosrite Ventures "Super Custom '65" from a Reverb seller in Tokyo, and received it a couple of days ago. The guitar had clearly been neglected for many years and was not cleaned up before it was listed for sale. Its strings were rusty (one was missing) and two of the pickups' leads were disconnected and needed to be re-soldered (and not disclosed in the listing). The price was lower than average, so I decided to not make a stink about it and proceeded instead to fix up the guitar.
Nasty, rusty strings, haphazardly wrapped on the tuning posts.
After wiping it down, oiling the fretboard and re-soldering the leads, I strung it with some fresh strings and did a set-up. The truss rod needed to be tightened and the action needed to be lowered, but it proved to be a fine player. The hot-wound pickups have the same wonderful growl heard on the classic mid '60s Ventures albums.
The only problem was it would not stay in tune. I tried applying some graphite (pencil lead) to the metal string guide, but that didn't help much.
I did some searching on the Mosrite Forum and came upon a post from a while back suggesting that the vibrato pivot could be a source of tuning instability, so I decided to take it apart and have a look.
I removed the entire tailpiece and, using an allen wrench, I unscrewed the two shoulder bolt barrels that enables the string block/arm assembly to pivote. The barrels roll on a ring of ball bearings inside the base, which you can just about see in the photo below.
The barrels were covered in dried-out, sticky grease, so it seemed that I was on the right path. I cleaned out all of the old sticky goop from both the barrels and the ball bearings with isopropyl, and I could see that the surface of the barrels was galled from the ball bearings.
I got out an electric drill and carefully tightened the thread-end of the barrels into the chuck, and ran them over some 400-grit sandpaper to polish the surface as smooth as a baby's bottom. I packed the ball bearings inside the tailpiece base with some black moly grease and reassembled everything.
Galled barrel on the left, polished barrel on the right.
After getting the guitar restrung and the strings settled in again, I was delighted to find that the guitar was no longer constantly going out of tune. The vibrato now operates with extremely smooth movement, with virtually no resistance, and I can now feel comfortable using it on stage!
Thee Original Beachniks...surf music from the caves of old Cape Cod!
Last edited: Oct 26, 2022 20:22:44
