Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

I took my 4001 S that i just got out tonight and played three, hour long sets with it. What a flat out killer smoking bass it is ! Sustain for days and the killer ricky growl . I really love the tone of the toaster front .The set neck is sweet . Wafer thin profile . Just an all around fantastic bass .

looks like my RIC pin!

We FEEL your satisfaction, Jeff!

Another S convert!

Glad you like it and congrats.

so how do you blow up the pics anyway?

I use a photo editor called The Gimp. It is an open source clone of Photo Shop. There are many such tools (some free) out there for Windows and other OSs. The forum limit is something like 500x500 and 34KB in file size.

Thinneckrick, did you say your 4001s has a set neck? My first Ric was a '81 4000 Jetglo, also with the glued-in set-neck. One day I took off the pickguard and was alarmed to see it was factory routed for a neck pickup. This meant there was only a tiny amount of wood holding the neck onto the body, since the neck heel was not nearly as thick as the body, as a neck-thru model would be. A luthier confirmed my worst fears so I sprung for a proper 4001. I always wonder if other people with set-neck 4000 basses also have that routing...it's not supposed to be routed there for stability reasons, JH told me at the time.

I pulled the pickguard a couple of days ago to do the cap mod on it and i looked at the way they did it as well . There is a little over 1/4 of an inch of wood left under the rout . as well as the 1 1/2 or so full width before and after the rout . Maple is an extremely hard wood and i would take an awful lot of force to break even a 1/4 inch of it in half . I looked at it and though that it was sound as a pound .they use the same glue that they used on a 4001 to glue the body wings on .I must admit, i did wonder the same thing but after looking at the way it was done , not anymore. Old 60's epiphone and gibson slab bodys did the same thing only most of that was mahogony Wich is far easier to break . But you still dont see much factory malfunction in them evn forty year old ones . Neglect and abuse is most of the problem.

Interesting...I wrote Mr. Hall about my concern with the routing when I had that 4000, and he seemed somewhat surprised that it went out the factory that way, and advised me to do no further routing in that area. This was back in '84 or so...I still have those letters around somewhere. The luthier I took it to said there was a hump in the fretboard where it joined the body...that's when I abandoned ship. Maybe it had nothing to do with the routed out wood (it was strung with roundwounds), but it seemed odd to me they would do the extra work of routing needlessly on a "budget" model...I chalked it up to a factory mistake at the time. That 4000 had the best sounding pickup though! There was no cap, but it still kicked butt over my de-capped '79 4001.

My '84 4001S(LH)set-neck has averaged 10 gigs a month the past 7 years with zero problems. Thousands of miles in the van, tons of gigs in the hot Texas sun, lots of abuse from airline baggage handlers, and never any problem, even with the bad paintjob