Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

I was never a chemist, but I was a sculpture major in college and did some lost wax metal casting. The original is made from wax and the quality of the back side is whatever level you finish it to. There really is no excuse for the poor quality shown on some of these. The wax piece is then encased ...

I have seen genuine originals which were much worse than the one you posted. I got this one from the Ric factory and returned it for a replacement which was somewhat better, but still not great.

Rub the lead from a pencil on a piece of sandpaper until you get a small pile of graphite powder. Mix some of the powder into a little bit of epoxy resin (hardware store) to make a rather thick liquid. Put a drop of it into the slot. If need be, you can contain it temporarily with masking tape on ...

You should be able to pick up a quart can of naphtha from about any hardware store with a good paint department. It is a commonly used paint thinner and fairly mild as solvents go.

The R tailpiece is the poorest bit of casting or metal work that you will find on any guitar on the planet - from anywhere on the planet. RIC obviously does not care. I was a sculpture major in college, often working with bronze, aluminum and other lost wax casting metals (never cheap pot metal ...

325 shaped Solid Bodies, possibly scaled down to obtain a comfortable weight.

I have one of those and really like it.

My 4003 is still pretty new and wearing the factory original roundwounds while I figure out what direction I want to go with it. The rest of the fleet has quite a variety. You can hear samples of them here (just click off their pop-ups wondering if you want to become a member).

https://www.dropbox ...

Also, there is limited clearance in the wood around the jack. There have been cases where it prevented the jack from making proper contact and working. The fix is usually just to loosen the jack a bit and spin it a little so that it clears the wood better, then snug it back up. It can't hurt to try ...

They run all the way out, just as they can on an unbound neck and are smoothed/beveled a bit on their ends. The amount of width gained is small, but along with tightening up the pairs, it made a great difference in playability for me.

Yes, we removed the varnish on the fretboard. It made no difference in playability or sound and to my eye it also looks much neater as shown in the photos.

I can't say much about the off-the-shelf nuts, as the one on my 370/12 was an Arnquist custom job, along with a re-fret all the way out to the outer edge of the binding. That and tightening up the string pairs made a huge difference in the playability for me and my big fingers. On my 340/12 I cut a ...

I suspect that there is a pretty drastic difference between what nitro may or may not do on the top and sides of an acoustic guitar's body and what it could do in terms of altering the sound when applied to the fingerboard of a solid body bass. As for nitro "breathing" I wouldn't count on it if I ...

I've always been impressed with how clean my 2030 bass can sound. At one point I was thinking about buying an acoustic bass guitar, though the low end performance on most of them seemed pretty poor. Then I tried half-round strings on my 2030 and found out that it would do that sort of sound better ...

Kind of strange pickguard shape at the back. Covering up a lot of real estate with a piece of plastic. I'd rather see something more like we see on a 4003 or more like on the six and twelve string guitars have, like I did on my 2030.

What has always amazed me is how poorly made the R tailpieces are. I was a sculpture major in college, and we did some metal casting - bronze, aluminum, etc. We would have been laughed out of the lab if we had come up with a casting as sloppy on the back side as the typical R tailpiece. I don't know ...