Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

So I actually took the initiative to remove the pickguards as I am getting a local guy to make me some black guards. Looking into the cavity i see the above written amongst some other scribble. when they paint these things black, they really paint them black, eh?

i am a bit proud of myself though. i am terrified to work on anything based on past experiences with tools. this is a baby step for me.

That would have been the official Russian export version Sean...

Congratulations, Phlemmy.

I'm old-fashioned, and I teach my students that a man who can't handle tools is not quite a man...(sometimes she's not quite a woman; sorry for the sexist language, but I cannot speak any clearer on this without losing the gist of it...)

I realize that this may offend some of you, and I apologize for my way of putting it, but not for the sentiment.

In my life I've owned lots of machinery, both simple and very complicated. But there are very few machines that cannot be viewed as an assemblage of simpler devices, and once you are familiar with such devices, you're able to tinker, fix, or build nearly anything, given the proper tools.

I used to love my old cars, and only took them to a mechanic to repair what I didn't have the specialized tools for (air conditioning and automatic transmission, mostly). My Citroen SM, often called the most complex car ever built, came to be in beautiful but non-running condition from an ex-Citroen dealer who was baffled by the car's unwillingness to run for more than ten minutes at a time. I isolated the problem to the distributor and built my own ignition distributor which used Ford points--running backward--which cost $8.00 (to the Citroen's $250.00) and the car ran flawlessly for years after that, until I sold it. My Rolls-Royce came to me in pieces, and never met a mechanic until it was time to get the a/c running flawlessly...

This sort of stuff is fun for me and guys and women like me, and guitars and amplifiers are a natural extension of the Tinkering Spirit.

Keep on toolin', Phlemmy. Your work and systematic thought processes, and your patience, will improve.

when it comes to anything beyond this, my tech will be the one handling it.

by the way, is the masking tape common on the underside of the guards?

Yes it is....

Old dried out masking tape to me = original pick guard.

definitely orig.

Sean what is that plate off of?

Is it an old split plate for a 4003 (Circa mid 1980's)?

I had a Rick with the inscription in the cavity " Shirley conquers the world!".
I think it was in an old 4001....

Don't call him Shirley...

dave, it's off of my '80 4003 TCxxx, definitely split guards.

At one point, I think Shirley COULD have conquered the world! But one can't fight gravity forever.

Only one point, JH?

fallen arches, eh?

Hey Sean...my original 4001 that I bought new is TC 768. It is white and it too has Olga's name written in it. I think twice even. Some of the scribbles I can't read, but it definitely says Olga at least once. It also says Chera or Ehera.