Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

OK.....So I picked up three Ric Bass bobbins from a guy who buys vintage stuff. All he said were that these were "older ones." So, for $25 I figured I'd take a chance.

Supposedly, all dead...but I cleaned the ends of the one with wires and a magnet and it tested to around 7k.

The other two are missing wires...well, one has a ground. One is a longer pole neck pickup bobbin. So, two are bridge bobbins.


BUT....two of the three are made from the GREEN circuitboard material and partially painted black. They have the black button top poles.

WHAT ARE THESE?? I thought all the green ones with buttons were high output, no? Are these late 60s-early 70s era, just after the horses ended, something else?

They are on left in photo...on right is my rebuilt 60s former lapsteel Horsie.

So...is it that no one knows how long Ric made this type of low output bridge bobbins on the green circuitboards with button poles?

Or is it a dumb question?

I thought that the bridge PUPs after the horseshoe types ended were high output? Is that incorrect and they remained low output but just had no horseshoes on them?

Jon, to me the three on the left look like typical 70s "higains", which were all wound to around 8.4k ohms of DC resistance. The top one looks as a neck bobbin, the other two look to be the bridge forms. These would have run from around mid '73 to the 90s when the current plastic bobbin forms were introduced. After the very early 80s, I believe the windings got hotter. Not real sure though.

Yeah, that's sort of what they looked like to me...but the bottom one reads like 6.9-7k on my meter.

That is what was confusing me, with the low reading and the green circuitboard material.... Had me
thinking that maybe there was some transition bridge PUP I hadn't heard of?

The higains on my '74 4000 and 4001 read a bit over 7kohms. The relatively low reading on your "oddball" pickup could reflect factory specs from around that period.