Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

730S Shiloh
# 2 in a series. Spruce top Rosewood back & sides. Love the bookmatch on the rosewood back.







Cheers,
Bill

Oops, there's more:

Bill, that is the most beautiful acoustic guitar I have ever seen. Wow!

I don't know a lot about Ric acoustics, never seen one in person. Are they available from dealers to order? Hard to find?

That is a stunning guitar, with the fretboard inlays and checked binding. Beautiful!

As I understand it, Dean, Rickenbacker are taking no more orders for acoustics for the time being. Don't know when they will start up again. Perhaps one for JH....

It is STUNNING, isn't it!!

Thanks Bill. Great photograpy. Please give us your impressions of the tonality of the 730S compared to other acoustics with which we might be familiar.

I had ordered a RIC acoustic through Mike Parks, but he ended up refunding my deposit because RIC isn't taking additional orders until they work through some of their backlog. I knew I was looking at a wait of 1-2 years, but now who knows when they'll even start taking orders again.
Ah well, I'll just have to look at the pics of Bill's beautiful acoustic and dream...

It is true that we're not currently accepting new orders for these- we're swamped.

Part of this is a growing issue that we've not yet found the solution to: there simply aren't enough qualified people in our county to do this kind of work and our nutzo cost of housing precludes attracting folks from outside. In fact, the best people are moving out of California so that they can afford to live at a higher standard.

I'm not opening a factory elsewhere- that would probably only be a short term solution anyway- so I'm not sure exactly what we are going to do. In the meantime we'll keep interviewing and hope we can find some folks who bought in here 20 years ago when it was affordable!

Guys, there's a RIC Comstock acoustic 12 on eBay with a few more days left. I'm sure the interested parties are aware, and probably should keep my big word processor shut...

It was at $2K yesterday.

Doh!! Take your own advice Paul (LOL) I'm on that one!!!

JH wrote: "...In fact, the best people are moving out of California so that they can afford to live at a higher standard...."

Where I live (70 mi.W of DC) we are feeling the brunt of growth from those who are trying to escape the Metro DC area, my own place has doubled in worth just in the three years I've owned it..I can't sell it and buy/move up locally, for everything else has gone up in a relative fashion...

Some sort of gentleman's secret, GG?

It was fascinating to watch it for days, and not a peep from anybody here.

Seriously, Graham, I'm sure all the hardcore folks are already aware and making their bids, judging from the bidding record.

Watch out for snipers, guys and gals...

I live in London - tell me about it!! I'm willing to move to Santa Ana and re-train as an acoustic maker! or just make the coffee?

John S.

Same here! As you may know, I live in Williamsport MD. which is around 40 miles north of you. When we built in '00 there were only a couple of houses in our developement....now there are quite a few and property values have skyrocketed!! I'm actually thinking of selling in a few years....I swore this was my last house, too! lol!!

I wonder if I can avoid capital gains if I sell my house and "invest" my $$$ on a few 4005'6's??

Well, somehow, John's post got shelved. I used to live in Charlottesville, about 100 miles W. of DC. Same problem with prices. You have to get to somewhere like the middle of Iowa to get any value in real estate these days.

(Now somebody's going to post their middle-of-Iowa story...)

I'm one of those people who moved away from an expensive part of CA (SF Bay Area) for a more affordable place to live and better opportunities-in this case, Seattle, which is really getting expensive too! I understand what John H is talking about. My parents reside in Santa Cruz, where the average single family home is nearly $600,000.

Also, I am an apprentice acoustic Luthier working alongside some really stellar craftspeople, both male and female- folks like Michael Gurian, Rob Girdis, Brent McElroy, and my own mentor, Cat Fox.
All of them, for example, understand production and consistency requirements as well as they do one-off work.
It occurs to me that it may be possible to take up your slack by offering an incentive to a qualified luthier team to build the RIC acoustics under contract, like Gibson did with it's association with Richard Schneider in the 70s-there was never any question about how well made those guitars were, and time has proved the handmade ones to be exemplary in construction and playability.(NOT the Kasha-derived factory Mark series-we all know how bad they were.)
It doesn't cost much to fly someone in for a day to handpick woods; and it would be easy to have timber shipped to ther facility for resawing, final seasoning, etc. Specs are easy to program into a CAD machine, too, and lots of folks are getting those since they are coming down so much in price...

Just a few thoughts.


Corey K