Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Before I bought my 330 I played a couple of others in shops. I had a fairly lengthy chat with the store owner who seemed to know his stuff. He made a point of telling me about the bridge and the flat head screws, pointing out that they need to sit perfectly on the plate attached to the body of the guitar. So, when my 330 arrived I was a little puzzled to see this;



As you can see the screw on the left has a good amount of daylight between it and the plate. The guitar plays OK, stays in tune and the intonation is fine.
Is this OK? Does it need adjustment?

Yep john it needs adjustment loosen all the strings and get the screws all bedded in the plate evenly!Then adjust the Action to your desired height.

scotty wrote:Yep john it needs adjustment loosen all the strings and get the screws all bedded in the plate evenly!Then adjust the Action to your desired height.

Never worked on a guitar before, not really sure what I'm doing. Should this be done by a professional?

John this is really easy take off all the strings and use the Allen key that is provided in the case for the adjustment.When all the strings come off the bridge will just lift off anyway. its just a matter of making all the screws level.Your only needing a minor adjustment to level it out.

You probably can even leave the strings on just reduce the tension and turn the screws!Hope you get it john

I loosened off the strings and pushed the bridge back in to place. Tried to get the action lower, which seemed to work, but when I put a capo on the 2nd fret the high e & b strings were out of tune. This must have been as I hadn't got the screws dead on level. So out came the ruler, and I tried to get them all as close to 6mm as possible.
This fixed the problem. Now I have a good idea what I'm doing I may bring the action down a little bit by winding the screws out a couple of mm. Didn't realise owning a ricky would be a full time job!

I Knew youd get there and now you know how to do this enjoy!

johnt wrote:... when I put a capo on the 2nd fret the high e & b strings were out of tune ...

This is to be expected: when you leveled the bridge, you actually moved the saddle points closer to the neck and thus changed the intonation.

The "tilted bridge trick" is one I have used in the past when all the strings are just slightly off intonation by the same amount - but I don't leave the other bridge screw dangling like that!

Ideally, you'd want the bottom of the bridge assembly parallel to the base plate.