The back story on the '64: This was the fifth Rickenbacker I ever refinished: belongs to John Williams and had an ignominious past before JWilli acquired it and sent it to me...a previous owner had put a Gibson stop tailpiece on it and there were two honking holes bored into its face for the threaded tailpiece thimbles. They'd been filled with epoxy and touched up, the whole mess had shrunk over time, and it was time to restore it to its original glory.
I refinished it back in the summer of '05 and shipped it back to John. When he opened the case, he found that one of the body wings had begun to split from the neck due to rough handling in shipping. He hung onto it for awhile, then sent it back to me for a repair. I attempted to touch it up after repairing the split, but the results were less than satisfactory, so I bit the bullet and gave it a complete refinish. Following a few weeks' shrink time for the new CV, it was flatted and buffed. Here it is, good as new.
The '83 AZ 4001 came from a customer in Colorado, after another luthier had repaired the neck unsatisfactorily. The new CV was peeling away from the frets, the inlays were cracking away from their pockets, and there were clamp marks on the side of the neck in the new CV. Originally, I was going to strip the neck, do a refret, and redo the binding and CV after touching up the AZ to match the original paintwork.
No problem, until it was time to touch up the neck. The neck and heel were stripped down to bare maple, and the neck was painted and given a fresh coat of CV. Upon unmasking, the back of the neck was a dead-nuts match for the front of the bass. However, the front was faded about a half-shade from the back, and this became obvious when the back and neck were seen together. Matching the neck to the darker back would have made the front of the bass look wrong.
The only solution was to strip the entire bass and refinish it from scratch, which the owner kindly agreed to. This had the additional benefit of correcting a number of scars in the original paint, and correcting a 3" long split in the paint on the back that went down to the maple...
So, it was stripped and refinished in fresh Azureglo, and ships back to its owner today.
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