Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Wow, that's a lot of information, thank you all so much.
And Ed, my hubs is a carpenter (which I suspect is a bit of the amateur guitarist dream), and we don't have a computer at home (because as I said he spent our savings on the 4001!!!), so he can't sign up at the moment. But I am sure he would be very happy to let me post a photo of his new baby.
Does anybody know any reliable stockist of any of the brands you mention for the UK?

Ahhh, I see, Oni. Understood. Yeah, I wish I could be a little more handy around the house, and certainly it would be a fantasy to be able to build a guitar!

Not sure about the string selection in the UK, but plenty of forumites are there...and at least TI's are made in Europe (Austria, I think).

Time for a dumb question. Does low tension equate to floppy? Meaning they move back and forth further, and/or slower?

If a string has more mass, it can be tuned to pitch at a lower tension. Being that it doesn't have to be as tight to be in pitch, it feels looser. Maybe.

But some strings feel loose (floppy) and are actually high tension. I found this to be the case with GHS Boomers. Even though they felt looser than the D'Addario XLs I usually use, they were higher tension, since I had to tighten my truss rods after I put them on.

So low tension does not necessarily equate to floppy. Depends on how the string is designed I guess.

Isn't it opposite? The thicker the string is, the higher the tension? Try to tune your G string to the pitch of the E string, that's floppy!

I think it all depends on the core wire used in the string. The smaller the core wire, the lighter the tension. The reverse is true too, so I've read.

There is a lot more to string tension than it's nominal guage measurement.