Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Charly: Thanks for making your tailpiece comments clear. I am glad that you felt no animosity and I appreciate your continued participation, even though some of your posts were lost due to my edit.

Aceonbass and I are local to one another so we may have taken advantage of our "eyeball" forums, and from another person's perspective, it probably looked worse than it was!

This saddens me a whole thread was deleted, especially since it contained official information.

I apologize for missing this, but which thread exactly was deleted?

I believe it was called Aluminum Hipshot

The Aluminum Hipshot thread discussing tail lift with JH's responses. Evidently there were some heated discussions later in the thread. I was reading all up to 1:05 AM EDT but didn't see anything worth pulling a thread over. Evidently it happened after that.

I think this may be the third thread that went bad since I joined here. Not too bad by normal web standards!
I attribute the whole episode to the full moon, or whatever stage the moon was at.
Getting wound up over tailpiece lift seems a little over the top.

I find the bridge tilt more annoying than the lift, but I've been living with both for years, so it's not an urgent issue for me.

Actually, the tilt is what drove me to try the Hipshot in the first place, not lift.
It was on my 4001 & the action was higher, so the tilt was much more noticeable.
My other two Ricks are more uncommon/rare, so I'm not going to alter them.
It's a compromise I'm comfortable with.

Everyone has a different perspective!

I guess I slept through the whole thing as everything was gone before I saw anything offensive. There was no shortage of misinformation, misconceptions, and unrealistic expectations but nothing I don't see all the time anyway.

Charly said:

... I believe scientists use the term verifiable to make that point ...

In the analytical chemistry field, multiple instruments/operators/days fall under the category of reproducibility.

Well at least it was business as usual then, John.

As always, thanks for your comments, however, short-lasting they may have been on this occasion.

OK, I think I see what it must have been about. Hipshot makes an aluminum tailpiece, a knockoff of the general look and feel of the RIC piece, although not exactly the same. So Hipshot is, to my understanding, making a product that clearly infringes on RIC's IP. In order to protect itself from yet another confusingly similar product in the marketplace, it was not enough to issue a Cease And Desist. The hipshot folks must have ignored or rebuffed it, and caused RIC to do the PTO process to establish that RIC et alii had the First Date of Use In Commerce on what should be a trademark for them on the 4001/4003 tailpiece anyway.

<rant>You know, in an effort to not beat a dead horse, I will not go into recriminations toward the hipshot folks. I will, however, reiterate what a crying shame it is that honest corporations in the US continue to suffer due to the lack of PTO reform in the US. With the taxes we pay, PTO should have a mechanism for interdiction and enforcement at government initiative and expense, to free individual corporations from having to file at full expense in each jurisdiction around the country at their own expense, or even before WIPO. This is a country of property rights under the Law - when a crook steals your physical property, the police at no cost to you go after the bad guys and punish them. You don't pay per-incident yourself. Why doesn't the same government go after bad guys who steal your Intellectual Property, at the same no per-incident expense to you, and put them in jail too?

This is not a political rant, by the way. I am just incensed at RIC having to work so diligently at their own sole expense to defend their IP so often to all comers. It is just not right...

And I suppose it is also a rant at how owners and enjoyers of the fruits of RIC creativity and manufacturing excellence are not more educated on the topic, despite the frequency with which it appears in this very Forum (and so many other venues) to the point where they will support and uphold RIC's right to its IP, and defend RIC to others who know too little on the subject </rant>

That being said, hats off to RIC for listening to users who said they needed a stiffer tailpiece without the extra screws showing What more could you want??

Nothing more than that my friend. So the new tailpieces are stiffer. cool.

Here is the pic I promised this morning showing the amount of lift on my '73 4001:



This is how it was when I bought the bass in Feb. '03 and has not changed any. The bass plays and sounds great so I am lucky; if the lift were any higher the bass would be unplayable due to no witness point being possible at the saddles. When RIc does finally come out with it's new tailpiece/bridge this bass will get one.

Glad it is stable and moderate. It must be the photo, but that SEEMS like a lot of lift! None of my vintage ones has ever had that much lift, but I do keep only light flats on them.

Here is the tailpiece detail on my latest 21-fretter, a Jan 1970 one:

Jefferey,
it's about the same as mine was. It bothered me enough to change it, and switch to chromes.