cassius987 wrote:
Dane, the inserted block looks really great in that pic, quite a tight fit indeed. To be honest I'm mystified how adding a new block of wood can patch existing problems with neck angle unless it exerts a sort of force that pushes the angle back, but in my head I have trouble picturing how that would work. However I don't doubt more wood in that position can at least prevent a forward angle from starting up. But have you actually seen this modification reverse a forward angle? If so that would be great. And do you think the block of foreign wood could do any harm like stress the wing/neck/wing joints by expanding and contracting in a different pattern than the finished wood?
I think the wood block would exert some passive support. But I agree with you, unless you would remove the wings and insert a block that would actively pushes back the neck to correct an uplift, it remains a passive support (i.e. It will prevent a neck lift to happen in the future on an otherwise correct bass).
But, the point is that Dane hit the proverbial nail on the the head. RIC should rout the neck pickup cavity in a similar way shown by Dane's modification. I cannot understand why they push the routing so close to the fingerboard. It actually was not a problem when the bottom wing did "meet the neck" at the 20th fret. But it does push the enveloppe with the curent bottom wing to neck junction now being very close to the end of the fingerboard. The worst part is that the current design does nothing to promote fret accessibility (on top of being not aesthetically pleasing).
The way I see it, RIC gradually learned how to build a bass until 1972. Then they gradually forgot about it when it introduced the 4003, except for the idiot proof truss rod system they introduced which was an improvement. Yet, I personnaly grew to absolutely love the old system (when used within its limits).
To be fair, the majority of the 4003/4001c63 or v64 will never develop any problems (and the impressive number of happy owners would demonstrate that). But why not implementing some very simple changes that would make it the totality of basses being trouble free?
Oh well, enough of me being a back seat seat driver. But I find it funny that the general perception is that the 4001 cannot handle string tension when it is the 4003 that I would be careful about (and the pre-72 4001 to be fair).
