The wood of john's first rickenbacker

[me_and_i]

I knew that his first rick was made of alder, but does anybody know if the wood was bookmatched? I tried to look very closely to his refinished (to the wood) first rick, but I coulden't find a single spot that let me know that it was bookmatched.
Or was it just made out of one piece of wood?

[larrywassgren]

The top is three pieces and the back is plywood(probably with a pine center and two very thin veneers). The plywood is one piece(not a two piece back). It is not bookmatched wood.

[roadrunners]

the back is plywood? isnt that kinda cheap? Are the re-issues plywood backed?

[jingle_jangle]

There was no bookmatching. The way it was built is much more akin to a shaped wooden plank than to a piece of luthiery or furniture. This is meant as a comment of building philosophy, not quality or playability.

A thin plywood back is inherently much more stable than a thin piece of species wood, whether bookmatched or not. Had wood been used instead of plywood, you would be seeing lots of splitting, depending upon the type of wood and the conditions which it endured.

[leftybass]

Actually, it has been said that Lennon's 58 325 had a solid 2-piece wood back rather than plywood, but most original 325's that are known in collections have been observed with plywood backs.

MANY hollow-body Rickenbackers from the late '50's have a plywood back, just don't think of the stuff you buy at Lowe's..LOL. We're talking nice furniture grade plywood with a thin veneer on the front and back. Not a compromise here--it worked quite nicely.

[tonewerks]

it's called baltic birch & it's voide free

[jingle_jangle]

Joe, it is most definitely not Baltic Birch.

Baltic birch first entered the USA in 1975, as part of a trade agreement with then-Soviet Russia. During the Cold War, there was precious little trade with Russia and virtually none in commodities such as wood.

Howver, there were a number of furniture plywoods which became available as a result of WWII development of plywood as a structural material, both locally-made and imported from Scandinavia. These became generically known as "Finnply", regardless of source country.

[johnhall]

Finnply/Baltic Birch is quite useful for constructing speaker or amp cabinets but it's absolutely, totally useless as a construction material for guitars.

John Lennon's '58 is believed to have left the factory with a solid two-piece back and the distribution of production suggests perhaps a 50-50 chance of any one of these being solid wood. Also, the plywood back ones are about 6 mm thinner as compared to the solid wood ones and visually Lennon's seems to be the thicker variety. One thing is for sure: the back of Lennon's has been changed at least once, the first time close to the time it was refinished black.

The '58 I own is the thinner, plywood/veneer-faced version.

[leftybass]

That's very interesting, that Lennon's had a new back put on it at some point---was it dropped? That is something that I don't remember being discussed previously. I wonder what the reason would be to 're-back' the guitar....

[jingle_jangle]

Splitting of the original, perhaps?

[leftybass]

Sure Paul, that could be a distinct possibility.

Maybe we have yet another reason why the guitar was painted black. John Hall may have had an opportunity to inspect Lennon's 58 325 closely, or someone who has reported this to him. In all of the threads I can recall about Lennon's guitar and all the hardship it experienced, I've never heard of a new back being put on the guitar.(It may be old news for all I know, lol...)

Maybe it had quite a knock and needed to be refinned, a bigger knock than everyone previously thought.

[jingle_jangle]

And my own reading, sort of random gleaning with the most outstanding anecdotal evidence being Andy Babiuk's book, never uncovered this interesting factoid, either.

[Scastles]

I can think of only one instance where the back might have been replaced and that was when the guitar was brought back to its original MG color.

[jingle_jangle]

I own a 1957 or '58 British solid-body guitar that I picked up in London's East End, called a Fenton-Weil. It is undergoing restoration, and upon stripping the previous owner's brush-painted attempt at a gloss black finish, I was intrigued to discover that the body is alder, with a thin plywood front. This seems to be a Mr. Fixit solution that some amateurs were fond of then.

[wayang]

Hey Paul, sorry to change the subject a little, but your knowledge of wood species and time frames leads me to ask this...do you happen to know the last year that Ric used/was able to get Brazilian Rosewood for fingerboards? My '74 has it...my '76 does not...