Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

There is no need to debate the issue in the first place. There is already a Right Way to do it, and a wrong way to avoid.

There is either Vintage Restoration in the truest spirit, or there is compromise.

I favor, as do most purists, Restoration over Compromise when it comes to $7500 vintage pieces (or $3000, or whatever). Especially when the Restoration costs nothing more than Compromise. Screw what Grover asked their dealers to do thirty five years ago. I worked in the industry repairing basses back in 1972 too, professionally.

Today, Grover would not recommend taking a gorgeous thirty-five year old original vintage beauty, and hack it up nowadays with non-original parts and techniques. They would also opt for restoration today, by re-swaging the pins and not with retrofitting screws to the housing instead of re-swaging. It's apples and oranges with a now-vintage pricey bass these days, over yesterday's news like the cheap 1972 method that is invalid today. No serious restorationist would be justified in doing that cheapfix anymore with true vintage pieces, they would take care and do it the tasteful and correct way instead and restore the pins properly.

Hey, John, what was valid way back when the bass was worth $300 is absolutely and unarguably NOT valid today, now that the bass is worth $7500. Restoration is the maxim today, not what we used to do with $300 basses.....

It is NOT the same destination, the road is everything

Wow Elys...

Maybe someone else here does not have 10 pre 1973 basses.

Perhaps they have an every day player 4001 from 1982 or 83 that they want to fix?

Open your eyes and shazam! You might be able to see beyond the end of your own nose...

Mho.

Elys, I understand your viewpoint and one may elect to adopt it as a matter of choice, but I do not consider it the only valid option.

The cardinal rule that applys here in this hobby is that there are no absolutes...

As a matter of consideration for warranty issues, it would make perfect sense for Grover back then to provide a field fix for Rickenbacker and others using their product to assist their customers, for it would not have been cost-effective for them to simply provide replacement tuners. Bottom line was that it was acceptable.

If I ran across a early 70's 4001 today that looked unaltered save for this particular repair to a set of Grovers, it wouldn't bother me a bit, and I think one would have a hard time around here labeling me anything but a purist when it comes to authentic, historically correct Rickenbacker instruments.

I'm not going to jump into this free-for-all, but will make some observations:

I've never seen a Grover key with retrofit screws in the corner nor did Grover ever offer this fix to us. Doesn't mean it didn't happen, just that I didn't see/haven't seen this.

The key housings are die-cast zinc, not pot metal. The main difference is that pot metal, with a variety of metals comprising it, is compressed into a die and then fused with heat after the part is molded. Die cast zinc uses molten zinc forced into a die (mold). Very different materials, processes, and outcome!

I've reswedged many keys over the years and have yet to see one come loose a second time. Obviously the trick is to do it correctly; a nail set and a suitable surface are about all that's needed to accomplish the job.

Ok, now maybe we can put this one to bed, before it really gets hostile!

This is an open Forum. I came on to answer questions as honestly as I can from past and present experience. The knowledge I offer is free, the pictures of work is what I do, not what I claim to have done. With that said I agree we should move on and not let narrow mindedness cloud our thoughts.

One situation has not been considered, although we've come close to, erm, fine-tuning it at a couple of points.

I never considered (nor do I care) what "fixes" Grover might have encouraged back in the early '70s. And if I was restoring a vintage Rick bass for a customer, and found screws in the case posts, I'd call my customer and let him or her decide (don't know any female Rick bass players, but I imagine anything's possible...) whether they wanted to pay the extra few hundred to find a good set of unscrewed posts, or leave the screwed ones on the bass.

That having been said, to do this to a set of otherwise-nice Grovers in this century seems to me to be the wrong approach. What was right for these thirty-plus years ago, is to me probably not the way to proceed as these get rarer and rarer.

There are two approaches to this sort of repair--there is the technician's/mechanics approach, like one would take keeping an old VW Beetle on the road, and there is the restorer's/preservationists approach, like one would take in bringing a vintage Ferrari back to its pristine original state.

What we might have had a mechanic's approach (and this was entirely valid at the time) back then, when the basses could be had for a couple hundred bucks and tuners for five dollars or less apiece (how many of these have been replaced with 1/2" shaft Schallers?), now that many of these basses are going for multiple thousands, with prices steadily rising, and the tuners are hitting $100 each, it's a shame to go drilling things and putting screws into them, IMO.

Hence my instructions for staking posts instead of drilling and screwing them. And I thought that, though Elys hinted at the distinction in the last paragraph of his post (above), the point about then vs. now was begging to be clarified.

Sorry about the wordiness, but it's philosophy of restoration, and I do a lot of thinking about this when I'm sanding away!

When the case is missing the little teenie weenie posts, no matter what kind of soft metal they are made from, I'd like to see you or anyone get out their hammer and center punch and put one back together. Grover quit making these because they were a poor design and leaving it up to people like myself and Steve Soest to repair them. I don't paint cars or work on 1/2 Mil. dollar Ferraris..I just do guitar restorations and construction.

Well, if the post is missing, then putting a screw in it won't work either...

Sorry for the automotive metaphor; I was a collector and neither owned nor worked on Ferraris, but I do see a lot of parallels between old cars and old guitars.

Now that I mention it, I see a lot of parallels between new cars and new guitars!

Painting cars (my own and show cars for manufacturers like Mazda, Ford, GM, etc...) was a very small (maybe 3 years) and very fun part of my past 35-year-career as a precision prototype builder and fabricator of things in wood, metal, and fiberglas for the electronics, machine tool, medical instrument, computer, toy, automotive, and, yes...music, industries.

I most certainly have not spent 30+ years working exclusively on guitars, like you and Steve, Dale.

Another unspoken fact is this:

Most trade-based careers (like yours, Steve's, my friend Gary Brawer's, and mine, if I can be permitted for just a moment and for discussion's sake, to join such august company!) require three things to succeed and make a living.

These are natural talent, a certain degree of training, and varying amounts of experience. These are present in each craftsman in different ratios.

This means that a craftsman with a lot of natural talent for what he's doing, a fair amount of training, and a good deal of experience may be able to perform as well as, or better than, another with less talent, but a full apprenticeship and equal years of experience. It all comes down to what we have, and what we make of it, given opportunities provided by each of our careers.

The big secret, and one which almost all trades (I can't think of one which doesn't, so I'm erring on the conservative side)--including luthiery--guards zealously, is this:

With a minimum acceptable aptitude and gift for working with one's hands, a manual trade can be taught and learned to a professional level to an inexperienced person in five years or less.

The rest is experience and professional growth and how you use it.

I will not quote chapter and verse on how I arrived at this conclusion, unless encouraged to do so, as it is highly personal and I feel would bore the pants off most readers of this Forum. But it will be the subject of one chapter in my book and possibly also of a thread in my own section of this Forum.

Mark: Thank you for your question with regard to the Grover tuners. It would seem that the answer was somewhat wavier than most expected.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this forum, at least for me, is to see the ingenious way in which skilled people routinely solve seeming impossible tasks. This thread is no exception.

That the solutions offered here are different is not unexpected given the wealth of experience and demonstrated abilities of those who took the time to post. Not only is the final solution of value, but the steps taken on route to the solution reveal the depth of thought of each of the participants who honoured the question with their passionate response.

I am reminded, each day on this forum, that genius stems not from convention but from aberration. At the end of the day, we are all the wiser for it. While individual strengths have led to differences, at the same time these differences have become our collective strength.

A point I would like to emphasize is this: If someone runs across something on an instrument that seems unorthodox, it would be wise to make sure that you are not reversing something that was totally intentional and had purpose, AND that was factory-original or factory approved.

Ultimately it depends on each case or observation and what the definition of 'correct' is.

How many of you would change these tuners out for the usual Klusons if you had this situation come up?


These open-back Kluson tuners have been on this 12-string from day one, and there are others that left the factory with them as well. Most people looking at them would condsider them to be replacements. Not so.

When doing a proper restoration on something that needs it, I am the first person who will vote to do things correctly....but it needs to be said that anything you do without gaining the knowledge and history about it first could lead to mistakes.

I have always heard of the swedging method that John Hall has commented on here and previously elsewhere, which is known and accepted. But if something such as a repair bulletin existed in the 70s for a field fix procedure for these tuners, then this has some acceptable historical merit in terms of correctness.

I think it would come down to this: Are we only concerned with fixing tuners on an otherwise very-original and correct bass, or a full-blown restoration.....you still have two possible and IMHO acceptable outcomes. Good debate everyone.

An excellent point John. Knowing the history of an instrument is of considerable value. The example you have given illustrates this point very well.

Paul W., of all the Grovers in my '74 4001FG only on the A-string Grover tuner one single post is loose (still completely present), please use the hammer and punch method when you work on it, please (although it still will be no vintage collectors bass but player solely)!

Grover quit making these because they were a poor design and leaving it up to people like myself and Steve Soest to repair them.

I'm not sure that I would call their design wonderful but these keys worked very well up to the day they transferred production to Taiwan. A combination of low tolerances, faulty procedure, and possibly poorer material caused these to beginning failing which killed the market for these keys.

While a better design might have made them more manufacturable in a wider set of conditions, I don't think the design itself was fatally flawed and responsible for its demise; the manufacturing standards certainly were.

Paul, after all these posts, my definition of friction continues to evolve.

Anyway, to return to my original question...are the bushings merely cosmetic? Or are they a necessary piece that keeps the posts centered?

(By the way---just to lighten things up, and to protect what little intelligence I do possess---I will submit that I do understand the difference between gravity and friction...but, er, the reason I was sitting down...was because of a friction burn.)

And with that, he discarded his dignity and moved on.