Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

After seeing this picture I could not wait to get this thread started (Sorry Jack. I couldn't resist). The bass belongs to Jack Hering and finish is by Dale Fortune. Pretty, isn't it? This whole thing started out as a report of a truss rod problem here on the forum. Tip of the iceberg, as they say. Anyway, the walnut wings were just a nice finishing touch I did for Jack. The real work was to correct a serious neck problem that the original owner could have had fixed by RIC under warranty but instead chose to dump on an unsuspecting Ebay shopper - our own Jack Hering. The full sized version of that pic is now my background on my home computer.

Beautiful !

The Walnut wings are very distinctive - Looks great.

I wanna pull it right through my monitor screen. Very nice!

This lovely bass had a bit of a fingerboard defect. A flaw I had never seen before and hope never to see again. Up front I want to say that this particular problem is probably very rare and this thread is not meant to be alarming or critical. I am posting this because I want to share with you all the way the problem was identified and addressed. The story ends well but along the way things were not so sure. Jack was adjusting the rods when the E side bottomed out and then broke. He was trying to get the neck to flatten out. He did not know this but in the process he mashed the wood in the body end of the truss channel so badly that the rod ends came out looking like this.



Jack started a thread asking about fixing a broken rod. I offered to send him one from my stock so we started exchanging e-mail. Before long it became apparent that the problem was a bit more than a broken rod. The neck was apparently warped into and upbow - or so we thought. Jack sent the bass to me for further inspection.

When the bass arrived I was working on several other projects (one of which is still on my bench! sorry JM I will get it done soon) so it sat for a few days. The first thing I did was slip in a new E side rod but the compressed wood in the truss channel made it impossible to seat the rod properly. At that point I made a hollow spacer out of hardwood dowel and glued it in to replace the crushed wood. Then I slipped in the new rod and tuned her up. Yikes!!! the action at the 7th fret was about 1/4" high. No matter what I did the action was just too high. What to do?

At first it looked like a simple warp. With neck totally unloaded (no strings or rod tension) I placed a straight edge along the fret tops. The center of the fingerboard was about .060" lower than the ends. What I did not notice at the time was that the ends of the fingerboard (frets 1-4 and frets 13-20) were actually on the same plane and the center of the fingerboard was scooped out. My mistake then was to treat it as a simple warp. There are 3 basic techniques for fixing a warped neck. Heat pressing, compression fretting, and releveling the fingerboard. Heat pressing is by far the most barbaric and not my favorite. This neck was so far out that compression fretting would not even get us in the ballpark and releveling based on my first numbers would have removed too much wood. So I reluctantly tried heat in small doses.

Heat did not help at all. Back to the drawing board! I measured and re-measured until the true nature of the problem became clear to me. I am a little slow on the uptake sometimes! That is when it became apparent that the center of the fingerboard had been improperly shaped and was not coplanar with the rest of the board. You could have knocked me over with a loosely coiled Ernie Ball .008 just then. I discussed the options with Jack. You know, it is not easy telling someone that a nearly new bass has to have the finish removed from the fingerboard, the frets yanked, the fingerboard leveled and then re-fretted. Jack is a real trooper. He simply asked if I could add walnut wings while I was doing it. What a guy. So I yanked the frets.

I have this really nice sanding beam that works with adhesive backed sandpaper. The face is cut into a perfect 10" radius. Just right for this task. The goal was to take the wood down around .040" I took measurements after every 10 passes until I was in range.



Unfortunately, we had to loose the little binding nubs at the fret ends. The right way to do this job would have been to rebind the fingerboard too. Oh, well.

The final sanding number was about .050" which was enough to make it level with no load. I wanted the final product to have a slight natural backbow so I used compression fretting to introduce about .020" of backbow to the level board. I also slightly back cut the fret tangs so the frets could lay over the binding. So far so good.

After leveling the frets I had to give it a road test so I strung it up and set the rods. To my surprise and delight it was actually playable. I took this picture and reported this news to Jack. Things were indeed looking up.



At this point the frets were leveled but the ends were still a bit sharp so playing it without bleeding was a bit of a challenge but I had to know!

The fingerboard at this point is lower than it was from the factory. To get the action down to the legendary RIC standards, I had to deepen the saddle and nut slots a bit. It is hard to tell but the slots are significantly deeper than stock ones.

After a little more fret dressing and polishing the bass was ready for a good setup. The humidity went up a several points over the last 3 days and I actually had to take a 1/4 off of the rods! More good news for Jack. This shot shows the strings NOT hovering high above the fingerboard. If I had thought to have taken pictures of the high action you would know better how significant this shot is. BTW That is masking tape on the side of the neck.




I was able to get the action down to 2/32" at the 20th fret which is about the limit for most Ricks. Success.

Now that the hard work is done the fun part can begin.

Then I shipped it off to Jack. He played it briefly and sent it to Dale Fortune for a partial re-finish. Jack got it back Friday and seems to be pleased with the result.