by (iiipopes) » Tue Dec 22, 2015 4:01 pm
A post above talks about the lower bout of the guitars being wider or narrower at different times. This is a function of when they were made, not a function of 320 (tailpiece) vs 325 (whammy). The wider bodied guitars are generally, although I don't know the exact dates, the later standard issue guitars of the '70's and '80's, before the "reissues" started being made. In an old guitar player magazine from decades ago there is an article about the process of starting the "reissue," or "vintage" models, and the Rickenbacker folks going through the old templates in storage and holding each one up to a guitar to match the "correct" one.
Remember that the numbering series for short scale guitars was originally:
310 - two pickups, tailpiece
315 - two pickups, whammy
320 - three pickups, tailpiece
325 - three pickups, whammy
And this carried through until modern times when popular corruption calls all the short scale guitars "325's," in spite of this designation only properly being assigned to short scale, three pickup, whammy-equipped guitars.
There are also other details not noticed except by those like me who have played both eras of guitars, including the scale length and pickup placement, as well as the wider or narrower lower bout. (Again, this is a generality; I don't know exact dates when things changed back and forth) The scale length on the '60's models (and therefore, the reissues) is 20 3/4 inches. The scale on my 1981 320 is 21 inches. The scale length seems to have been lengthened by moving the bridge back towards the tail the extra 1/4 inch. Originally, my 320 had 1/4 inch more space between the bridge and the bridge pickup than do the '60's era guitars, which leads me to speculate that the pickup routing jig remained the same. I wondered why I didn't get all the jangle I should, so I moved the bridge pickup that 1/4 inch closer to the bridge, and split the difference with the middle pickup. I got the "bite" back with the jangle.
Yes, I delved into all this decades ago when I thought about trying to convert my 320 to a Lennon replica. When I realized it just wasn't going to happen, I settled on moving the pickups and changing out the 320's 14kohm overwound neck pickup with the underwound pickup in the bridge position of my 1981 360-12WB FG ckbd to match the underwound bridge and middle pickups on the 320. Before the cries go up, my 360-12 had a pickup open up, so it had already lost its originality, and since the pickups were from the same year, I switched them out. I had the dead 12-string pickup rewound and unwound the remaining 14 kohm high gain down to @ 8 kohms. Again, before anyone cries out - that pickup was so muddy as to be unusable, and this was before RIC offered the 7.4 kohm toasters as a standard item in the boutique. Now the two pickups in the 360-12 have a clear, chimey, almost "acoustic-y" tone that really compliment that guitar, and my 320 has three really jangly, clear pickups, in the flavor of early Beatles. (Again, remember that the 7.4 kohm spec is an average of mid-'60's pickups that were measured after being auditioned tonally in prototyping the "new" toaster, and that late '50's and early '60's toasters generally had a little less wire on them.)