Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Now don't laugh - I bought this guitar about 6 years ago it is a 1967 330 MG. Great guitar and I love playing it. Sometimes the treble pick up would cut in and out but with a wiggle of the jack plug all went back to normal - This problem has continued for the past month and then the treble pick up cut out completely. Now only the bass pick up works. So I opened the control cavity thinking it was a loose wire no big deal but that was not the case. and No I have never opened it after I bought the guitar until now. Anyway there are two jacks - a second one has been wired off of the first. So I tried them both and the funny thing is one controls the treble pick up and one controls the bass pick up but neither will work both pick ups. I checked the wiring and matched it to a ric schematic and it seems to be wired OK although you might have guessed I am no expert on this. I have some pretty good pictures if anyone would be interested in providing an opinion. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Len

A 330 should have one normal two-connection jack. I suspect that someone wanted to do a "Ric-O-Sound" of his own, and had it wired that way. If you want your 330 to be like a stock guitar, just clip the extraneous jack and wire in a new American-made 2-conductor jack. If you want to keep it like it is, then buy two identical jacks and rewire it identically to how it is now. The problem is undoubtedly one or both jacks. Small pictures make it hard to tell.

Buy American-made jacks; they are made to tighter tolerances than Asian parts and of better materials. This is critical to proper and reliable functioning. And use an American-made cord, too. Asian cords are often not to specs.

If, as it sounds, your guitar has twin jacks and Ric-o-sound then there is a decent possibility that it's actually the hole in the wood for the regular (non-Ric-O-Sound) jack that's causing the problem, not the jacks themselves, the wiring, the solder joints, etc. The regular jack is a more complex construction and is the bigger/wider of the two. It's not stereo-wired like the Ric-O-Sound jack, but it has a switch built into it. It's often a very snug fit as you try to fit the jack into it's proper hole through the body. If the parts of the switch don't have enough clearance and can't move properly as you plug your guitar cord into the jack, you will get pickups cutting out. I went through this with my first 360/12. I'd pull the jacks out of the body and they worked great on the bench. Then I'd re-assemble the guitar and they wouldn't work. I was about to go nuts and then I remembered an old photo that Mark Arnquist had sent me of a mod where he would bore out the body a little bit, inside the control cavity around that jack hole to eliminate this problem. As it turned out, I was able to fix it on mine by simply rotating the regular jack a bit in it's hole and snugging it down in a new orientation where the switch had enough clearance to work properly.

It could certainly be something else, but this scenario has most of the tell-tale signs. You might want to unscrew the jacks and pull the jack plate off, then pull the jacks themselves out through their holes a little bit, so that they're clear of the body and then plug the guitar in and see if it works. If it works fine that way, it's a wood/metal clearance problem and not too hard to fix - either by carefully orienting the jack in it's hole or by going in there with something like a Dremel and making a little more space for the switch part.

Good point, Todd!

I'm having a "DUH!" moment here, as I just got through enlarging the rear (non-ROS) jack holes in TWO basses on which the bridge pickups were cutting in and out...

This is one of only a very few cases in which a Dremel tool is the best tool to use for a guitar repair task. I used the 1/2" drum sander--the amateur guitar butcher's favorite Destructo®. As long as the sandpaper sleeve is of the coarse variety and brand-new, and the tool is used on medium speed, it will enlarge the hole very easily and quickly.

When I do enlarge a jack hole, I start in about 1/8" in from the surface of the body, leaving the original hole size as a sort of ledge. This avoids the possibility of slipping and having the drum mar the finish around the hole, or of over-enlarging to the point where the hole shows around the jackplate (improbable, I'll admit).

I've also found that the hole, even in its stock location, often already cuts somewhat into the back wood of the guitar or bass (more a problem for solidbodies like 600 and 4000 series than a 330 or 360), so I concentrating on actually ovalling the hole, with most of my efforts concentrated on the two edges of the hole at the sides (with the guitar or bass lying on its back), rather than those at top and bottom. With the hole ovalled, the jack can be rotated until you can no longer feel a binding at one point. That's the way it needs to sit when you get it all bolted up again.

Oh, be sure to blow aout all the sawdust with a nice jet of compressed air--outdoors preferred, or it'll get all over everything and you'll always find piles of it by the jack holes in your case!