Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Glad to see this is something not uncommon. Looking at some of the pic's of the fine specimens in the show your Ric thread, I thought I was the only one with Ric mojo!!

John

I have an identical bubble on my '03 Jetglo 4003 - I first spotted it a couple of years back, & have left it well alone - it has got no worse & that is fine by me. A one eyed man on a horse wouldn't spot it so it is no big deal - if you start trying to rectify it you could end up making it a lot worse!

My 04 4003 JG has a couple teeny bubbles on the E side of the tailpiece, one "popped" (now a chip, I guess) and one not, right where the tailpiece meets the finish. Just seems to be a trend with these things. Never bothered me, and since I'm selling it, I guess it never will.

Is this just a JetGlo problem or does any other color do this?

Mine is a Jetglo.

A few early [4001CS] had a similar problem, especially surrounding the tailpiece.

Wood is an organic material, and as such is outrageously and frustratingly unpredictable.

The challenge in building guitars, which is magnified a hundredfold when "building" becomes "manufacturing in quantity to a production schedule", is simply this:

To get the wood to behave.

By "behave" I mean to accommodate its normal unpredictability in manufacturing and finishing processes. We can't tell it what to do, so we design processes and tailor materials in the best way we know how, to enable us to get good results working with it.

Torquing down the tailpiece, which is how this sort of thing happens, can be done in several ways, but in this case, it's done with a power screwdriver with adjustable torque.

Through trial and error, a consistently repeatable torque figure is found, that tightens down the tailpiece screws without putting too much mechanical stress upon the wood/paint/varnish area at the points where the tailpiece contacts the guitar.

Because maple varies in density from tree to tree, billet to billet, and even from area to area within the billet, occasionally something will happen over time to cause the CV to lift. Obviously RIC would not ship a guitar or bass to a dealer, which had this problem.

What happens subsequent to inspection, packing and shipping, to stress these tiny contact patches, is quite beyond anyone's control. From a product engineering standpoint, the best possible situation would be for the contact area to be a wide, flat area, in order to spread the mechanical stresses over as wide an area as possible. But such a part design is not possible in die-casting, which requires consistent part wall thickness for strength and moldability.

Second best scenario is to have a perfectly flat die-cast edge meeting a perfectly flat guitar paint surface, so once again the stress is spread along the entire contact edge. Again, not physically possible due to limitations of the manufacturing process and the hand finishing process, and the fact that paint and wood are by nature softer than die cast alloy.

Briefly put: S**t happens.

Ok, playing devil's advocate, wouldn't having the rout (where the 3 screws go) be the correct depth so the tailpiece just meets the routed wood go a long way to not allowing the edges of the tailpiece to exert too much pressure on the finish and therefore not allowing over-tightening and causing the bubbling problem, along with not exacerbating any tail lift?

Theoretically, yes. In practice, difficult to maintain that perfect clearance, due to the paint situation. Even if the paint was robot-applied in that area, thickness would vary so much that the tailpiece would only fit correctly only one time in perhaps twenty or so.

Production solution is to route that contact patch too deep, to cover the paint thickness situation.