Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Hello all, first post, long time ogler. I was looking to replace the nut and bridge on my ric to get more spacing between the string pairs. I ordered the items directly from Rickenbacker. The luthier was able to replace the bridge without issue, but the nut seems to be much shorter than the one that's installed on the guitar so the luthier said he couldn't work with it. Anyone else have this kind of experience? Any suggestions on where I may be able to find a pre-cut nut that will fit? Thanks in advance.

When you say "shorter than," do you mean "not as wide as" the existing nut?

RIC makes two pre-cut 12-string nuts: one for 330/360/620 models and a wider one for 660 models. Nut widths for those models are 1 5/8 and 1 3/4, respectively. You might want to measure the product you received from RIC and contact customer service if it's not the correct dimension.

Thanks for the note, it's a height issue, the width is fine. I contacted customer support about it but got nowhere with them. The luthier that was working on the guitar also reached out to them via e-mail (not in the nicest way, I admit).

I guess my question is whether the height of the nut changed since 1981. That was all I tried to establish with Rickenbacker but never got an answer about it, so I thought I'd try to find out here.

Since the nut sits on the maple part of the neck, I guess the real question would be has the thickness of the fingerboard changed? I can't help on that one, but why not just have your luthier cut a new nut? I made one for my 340/12 and if I can do it, any decent luthier should have no problem doing it. I made the blank for mine the same width, height, crown shape and thickness as the original and just spaced the string slots differently using a set of Norman nut files that I bought off of eBay, which worked quite well. I would think most luthiers probably already have a set of some sort of nut files.

My 370/12 was set up and fitted with a new nut by Mark Arnquist and the invoice says the strings in the pairs were spaced like this:
"String pairs are set at ; High "E" ,"B" ,"G" & "D"- .065" apart . The "A" is at .070" and the low "E" at .075" apart ."

Then it's a matter of deciding just how close you want to get to the ends of the frets with the E pairs and spacing the other pairs between them. In my experience, if you usually play with a fairly light touch, you can get pretty close to the fret ends without falling off of the fingerboard.