Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

A lot of good thought, solid reasoning and professional attention to detail makes these unique instruments. May they have a long and happy working life with an owner who obviously "gets it" where Rickenbackers are concerned.

Todd, thats some great level of work that you've done to your guitars. Quite frankly its awesome the level of fit and finish you've brought to the instrument.
I feel reinforced that what ever I might do has been done double before. As I've said I own over thirty instruments and most all of them have been modded to some extent or another. That is other than my Ric 360 and 370. I have a tremendous admiration for my Ric's and the thoughta of buying one and changing it with a drill bit or dremel it not being taken up lightly by me. I am trying to be patient.
But its hard as there seems to be somewhere around zero Ric Jetglo 370/6 strings on the market right now. Thats what is driving me to this some might say crime. If I could find one then I'd leave this idea in the dust of still borns.
I consider these guitars works of art so its not lightly that I am considering such a mod that involves actually cutting or drilling on one of these beautiful instruments. Part of it too is that I'd be messing up and other wize healthy 360 forever. It does seem somewhat of a folly to buy a nice guitar and then cut it up. But I have a 360 and want a 370. It would not be a problem for me at all if it were simply a pickguard change combined with a wiring change. Pickguards are plastic and can be easily returned to stock.
This is kind of like the old thing of whatever you want there seems to be none of them at the time you want one. Such as for instance you want a Mopar truck. Well there will be not a one available. But the minute you buy a Ford the paper is suddenly full of nice Dodge trucks.
My stable mate to my 370/12 is in this demenision. Of course I don't want to be held up and robbed to get one either. A price that they all go for is fine. But right now reasonably priced available 360/6 in Jetglo are available and a 370/6 is not.

Paul, or even Dale, could do the deed for you and it would look factory.

The actual work of adding the middle pickup isn't really difficult, but as you can imagine, taking a big drill bit to a spot right in the middle of a perfectly good Rickenbacker is pretty scary. I decided it was safer for the finish to do it using an electric hand drill on a padded table than to try to get the guitar into the drill press without scratching it. You lose the ability to have the machine hold the bit perfectly plumb and lose any sort of built-in depth stop, but you're not going very deep and there is a little bit of built-in fudge-factor because the pickup cover is quite a bit larger than the hole you need to make for the magnet. Step #1 is to try doing the entire installaton on scrap maple (use real maple as you need to get a feel for it and how much pressure to apply as you drill). Once you've done the mock-up and figured out how many holes you need to overlap to make the slot, how deep they need to be, what it takes to drill the small feeder hole for the wiring, how big and how deep the holes for the adjustment screws need to be, you can pop a pickup in and make sure everything fits properly. At that point, the real installation is still fairly scary, but a much smaller gamble as you'll have a pretty good idea of what it takes.

A forstner bit is a large bit which cuts a round, flat-bottomed hole. A new sharp one (which is what you need) will do it very cleanly. The bit is essentially a cylinder-shaped cutter on a stick and on the center of it's bottom, cutting side, there is a small sharp point protruding out 1/8" or so. This is a guide which both allows you to aim the bit precisely when beginning a hole and more importantly, it keeps the bit from "walking" (wandering around) as you drill. To make the pickup slot, you use a 5/8" diameter forstner bit and drill six overlapping holes in a straight line. Unlike many types of bits, the forstner will allow you to do this as the guide point will keep it from walking even when the hole your making is part wood and part air where your new hole is overlapping the previous hole. Do not try to do this job with a different type of bit as it's likely to spin off course and tear up the top and don't even think about trying to make the hole using a Dremel and cut-off wheel. Despite possibly seeming a bit curious, as Paul mentioned, this "forstner bit/overlapping holes to make a trench" method has some Rickenbacker history and is occasionally seen on old factory-original guitars. For individuals who don't own big factory-type stationary tools, it's the way to go.

Here is my 330 with the middle pickup moved off to the side. You can see the overlapping holes and the depressions made by the bit's guide point. Each hole was drilled in several short controlled bursts to allow frequent depth checking and to prevent excess friction heat from burning the wood. I started with six shallow holes and worked my way back and forth, deepening them a little bit at a time until they were all the same depth as the factory neck/bridge routs and would take either a high-gain or toaster (longer magnets). After drilling, I sanded the "points" at the overlaps back a bit with a tiny sanding drum in the Dremel for a slightly more rectangular trench and a little more room for the rectangular magnets on high-gains (might as well only do this job once, so it's worth being sure that either type of pickup will fit the trench). I also sanded and rounded the top corner of the hole just a little tiny bit where raw wood meets the top's varnish. We don't want to accidentally chip the varnish next to the trench while getting the pickups in. The small feeder hole was then drilled from the end of the trench through to the control cavity for the pickup wires. Finally, the small holes for the pickup adjustment screws were drilled and the inside of the trench was given a coat of brushed-on varnish as a sealer.



They say "measure twice, cut once". In this case, you want to measure about five times and cut once! Here is the plan. It's not to scale, so don't measure off of it, but it will show what you need to lay out before cutting. There is no way in hell that I would try this operation without being able to see the holes for the other pickups. Perhaps the pickups could be unscrewed and moved off to the side, but it's better to unsolder and remove them to get them out of your way.



We want the maximum span of our linked-hole-trench to be the same width as - and lined up with - the factory routs for the other pickups. A couple pieces of masking tape running along the edges of the neck and bridge trenches (north/south in the drawing) will work well for marking-off the space.

We also want our middle pickup to be half-way between the bridge and neck pickups and this gets a bit tricky.

IMPORTANT - In a perfect world, all the routs and all the holes would line up just as they are in the drawing. This is not always the case in the real world. The actual positions of your pickups on the guitar's top are determined not by the magnet trenches - BUT BY THE POSITION OF THE PICKUP ADJUSTING SCREW HOLES NEXT TO THE TRENCHES - which may or may not come centered exactly on the middle of the existing trenches (neither of mine were). In order to find the proper mid-line where you dig the new trench with the Forstner bit and drill the little adjusting screw holes on it's ends, you need to find the midpoint between the neck pickup's adjusting screw holes and the bridge pickup's adjusting screw holes. Distance "A" on the drawing needs to be the same as distance "B". Just positioning your new trench halfway between the neck and bridge trenches and screwing down a pickup there may not do it. You have to make certain that the adjustment screw holes themselves are evenly-spaced, Then when it's all done and you screw-down your new pickup, it should end up evenly spaced between the original pickups.

Anyway, that's the process if you want to do it yourself or have someone local do it for you. 80% of the time spent is the planning and only about 20% actually drilling. A pro like Paul or Dale could probably do it with a pin router and make a neater hole that matched the other two if you prefer it, but it can be done at home if you work carefully.

This is the best tech post I've read on these forums. Great job, Todd.

Wow thanks a lot for your Post Josh. It makes a whole lot of sense now than before. One thing I didn't know is that the body was solid under the pickups.
Why I didn't know that is I used to have a Kustom guitar. Very simular looking guitar if you've ever seen one. But Its totally hollow inside.
This forestner bit sounds suspiciously like a hole saw to me? Are they one and the same animal? Where do I get one if its different?
Alright here's another question about. A 360's guard is slotted for the pickups. My 370 twelve's pickguard is flush with the pickups. What did you do about that? The orginal guards look like some kind of formica to me. They may not take to being cut on very well.
Please don't get me wrong I've modded a lot of guitars and I admire your work. But like you said this cutting up a perfectly good Rickenbacker is scary. Like I'm doing a sacreligious thing or something.
I had planned on if I did it to put down some adhesive tape down to try and prevent any neigbhoring wood from being chipped. I was going to measure where the exact center was from the other two pickups and make the tape just a bit larger than the holes to be drilled. I had thought about putting some dark maghogny stain where I cut into at to seal the wood again.
I think I can do it but its still a terrible thing isn't it to spend a lot for a prefectly good guitar just so you can cut it up LOL..

What you're seeing under the hole is the end of the neck glued inside the body. As it turned out on the 330, making the depth of the new holes the same as the depth of the holes for the other pickups went through the top and stopped neatly at the neck block. You can see the walnut stripe in the neck wood inside the trench. On my 360WB, making the new holes the same depth as the old holes left a thin layer of top wood and didn't expose the neck. I can't tell for sure, but the 330's top seems to be slightly thinner than the top on the 360WB (it's also a more resonant guitar, so maybe that's part of the reason). There are a couple of cool photos on the Rickenbacker factory website that show how the top of a 360 is hollowed in some places and solid in other places. They're about half-way down this page in their woodshop section.

http://www.rickenbacker.com/factory_woodshop.asp

A hole saw and a forstner bit are very different. A hole saw uses a sheet-metal ring with saw teeth to cut out a circular line, but doesn't remove the wood inside that circular line. The only way you can actually cut a hole with a hole saw is to go all the way through the piece you're drilling on (works fine on a door, but it's an obviously bad idea on a guitar). A forstner bit is different. It's a heavy, cast metal bIt with teeth and chisel-edged cutters. It cuts out a flat-bottomed, cylinder-shaped hole, removing everything inside the circle as it goes down into the wood. It's a much more precise tool, especially as you start the hole and have to cut cleanly through the varnish or when your hole needs to stop cleanly at the bottom without going all the way through. You can buy individual forstner bits at big box or hardware stores and a 5/8" one will probably run $5-$7 or so.



Rickenbacker pickguards are made from sheet acrylic (plexiglass is one brand of sheet acrylic). The tongues between the pickups can be cut off and the edge sanded straight to turn 360 guards into 370 guards. I use a band saw on plexi when I make guards, but I suppose you could modify a set of them with something as simple as an X-acto razor-saw (hobby shop) and a hunk of sandpaper wrapped around a block of wood if you don't have access to a band saw. You can also score and break plexiglass cleanly along the scored line. It works most of the time, but there are those occasions when 90% of the span breaks cleanly on the line and the last 10% goes nuts and ruins the piece. The other option is always just buying some new 370-style guards or having a set custom made by a company like Pickguardian. I like the vintage style which are made from clear acrylic and then painted on their back sides, rather than being made from white pre-colored acrylic. Back-painted guards just seem a little richer-looking and I like to play around with different bevels and radii on the edges and then polish them so that they transmit light and seem to glow. It's not an activity that's going to change the world, but it's kind of fun.




The best advice I can give you is to start by doing a full-scale mock-up or two. When you have proven that you can do a proper pickup installation on a hunk of Home Depot maple shelf wood, then it's time to start thinking about doing it for keeps on your guitar. It well may be that it's the most valuable, and one of the most beautiful things that you'll ever attack with a power drill, so it's not a job to be taken lightly. Buy a forstner bit, do some test installations and then decide whether you want to try the real thing or send it to a pro.

Well done, Todd/Josh. You have a new ID as a rising Nashville star, it seems...

You can get a guitar into a drill press without scratching it by taping a diaper onto the drill press table with some masking tape...

From a philosophical standpoint (referring to my old inspiration, "The Nature and Art of Workmanship" by David Pye), any craft project can be typically divided into two types of workmanship: the workmanship of risk, and the workmanship of certainty. An ideally-completed and fully-realized task, whether it be putting a third pickup into a 360, or lathe-turning and hand-carving an elegant wooden bowl (Pye's own specialty), displays a natural balance between these two methodologies. Accepting this balance as a goal, the closer we come to it, the more validity and integrity we will see in the final result. From an emotional standpoint, the final object will be innately more satisfying, both to ourselves and to the observer. It will feel "right".

Artists make much (whether they know it or not) out of violating this ideal; they deal primarily in eliciting emotions from us, whether it be a feeling of being off-balance (with too much tension between the opposites) or a feeling of tranquility (too little tension). So at this point, art and craft take separate roads out of necessity.

The workmanship of risk requires much more manual input (and acquired dexterity) and control than that of certainty, whose characteristics are planning and precision, and which can be done by unskilled and semi-skilled workers if their task is prepared for them.

All philosophy aside for the moment, the feeling of fearful anticipation that we may get when contemplating beginning such a project is a sure indicator that something is out of balance with regard to these two component methods. It could be said that a person is merely scared because he/she doesn't have the skills to accomplish the task (in which case the fear is there for a good reason), but reflection will tell us that this is too simplistic a "solution"...

The feeling of fear is due to a lack of knowledge about the act of fine-tuning the balance between risk and certainty, taking into account (for instance) limited manual dexterity, in which case we skew the approach by adding in more workmanship of certainty. If the fear factor is lack of knowledge about the proper approach or the order in which steps should be taken, then it is incumbent upon the craftsman to avail himself of the immense resources present since the internet came into common use.

In cases of the other side of the continuum, where the cost of certainty (machinery and tooling is expensive) is prohibitive or impractical for just a small task, then it becomes a situation of adjusting the balance in favor of risk, which requires less money (excluding hospital bills for slipped chisels and the like) but much more skill. Solution: practice on scrap.

On the practical side again: Hole saws are for installing locks in doors or for boring bigger holes in thinner materials, where a through-hole is the aim. As Todd "Josh" Bradshaw has stated, a Forstner bit clears away the wood inside the circle as well. Anyone who's had the guard off a Rick bass (especially a lefty) knows the distinctive look of a Forstner-rendered hole.

Todd's 100% correct (nothing like experience coupled with awareness and great communication skills to make one an exceptional teacher) in this: if your gut feeling is hesitation at attacking the surface of a gorgeous two-pickup Rick in order to install #3, try installing a pickup on a plank using the same method you plan on using. Success in this will help with the confidence problem, and it's confident craftsmen who do the best work. (Over-confident tradesmen do lousy work--that's why I had to re-install my kitchen faucets...the plumber put 'em in backwards while trying to impress with his abilities, then left behind a great pipe wrench that I had to call him to pick up later...)

Oh, and the difference between "tradesman" and "craftsman"? Well, "tradesmen" show up late, leave early and have lots of reasons why things are not as simple as they seem. Oh, and there's the bill, too.

Craftsman, on the other hand, is a brand of tools sold by Sears, Roebuck, and Company.

Well Todd even your pickguards are outstanding pieces of workmanship. It might be wize for me to consider the pickguardian. I rather like the gold ones myself. However it might be nice to have them both (my twelve and this six) in white to match completely.
The name I was looking for popped into my brain finally. Its Lucite. Thats what the guards look like they are made out of to me. That kind of old style kitchen covering material that you used to see quite commonely around just not anymore.
In our little band my rymthm buddies color is green. You know green on his mic covering and so forth so that the sound man finally catches on. I just finished making a mint green guard on my Dano twelve for him. However its not as nearly as nice as yours. I have been toying with the idea of making the top guard on the twelve in mint green too. I have a scroll saw and a band saw. I just don't trust my band saw as much as I do the scroll. It does a little finer touch and my band saw has some particular things about it.
One of the things about mint green is that the more other colors you have around it the more the mint green stands out. Like having white or black knobs and not mint green itself on them.
I have a drill press although it may be quite rusty LOL..I must confess I haven't used it too much lately. But I can see where having it set for a predetermined depth would be the Cat's Meow.
Thank you for the link to Ric's berthing process too Todd. It looks like the top of the neck insert into the body is what I would be drilling into if I carry my crazy scheme out. Thank you also very much for showing the Forestner bit as well. One picture can truely be worth a thousand words there. Although I do love Paul's encouraging speech too LOL.. It looks as though I should be able to find the Forestner bit at Lowes then probably?
I think it might be time to bring my wife up to speed on this possible project. Better to shock her now than to see me first with a brand new Rickenbacker in my Drill Press LOL..

Lucite is DuPont's trade name for Plexiglas, which was Rohm and Haas' trade name for methyl methacrylate, generically termed "acrylic". In the UK it's known as "Perspex". Rohm and Haas has been out of the biz for some time now, incidentally.

I think you're thinking of "Corian", Dan, which is made from Lucite grindings glued together under pressure. It is countertop material, but is definitely not transparent. Then there's also "Formica", also available under other trade names ("Micarta" being one...) which is a phenolic-backed melamine composite.

It looks and feels different to me. I bought some Plexi not long ago. I used the Mint Green guard material on the guard I cut out for the Dano. It cut very well on my scroll saw. When I used the Plexi it melted back together almost as fast as I cut it.

So you cut your guard with a band saw Todd? I have this Scroll Saw that should do the deed alright if the stuff doesn't melt back together. The pickguard material that I ordered for the MInt Green Guard that I made for my Dano did not melt. But I tried to cut Plexi with it before and it melt making quite a mess.
It doesn't look as though much has to done with the guard. It looks like all I've got to do is line up the two points, mark them and cut a way.
Its time now to look at all the prices for any Jetglo 360's that are available.