Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Hello everyone!

I'm new to the forums, and new to RIC's...
I recently bought my first one on eBay. After a bit of searching and what not I found a 1979 370.
I can't wait to have it in my hands!

Anyways, since I don't know everything about RIC's I wasn't sure of the name of the color it was in. After doing a bit of research I concluded that it was in Ruby, it didn't bother much to me since atleast I knew I loved the way it looked.

But now I was reading here and I've heard that Ruby was only available from 1980 to 1984.

I'm sure my RIC is a 1979, that's what the website serial number verifier said.
So here's a picture of it...



Maybe I'm just wrong and it's not Ruby and it's Red... It just doesn't look like Burgundyglo to me...

And finally, do you think 1000$ in US funds is being ripped off for what I got?

Patrick, you did fine at $1000. No ripoff there. Rule of thumb.....if you can see woodgrain thru the finish, its Burgundy-Glo. Ruby had a definite metallic look to it. RED was definitely RED.

Welcome Patrick. A stunning photo. To me this finish is Ruby for the reasons John stated. The undercoat is a silver finish. The time frame for Ruby is also right. I love the white and Ruby look. The red with the black trim never did much for me but this finish is sharp!

I'm sure I'm going to be really happy with it, apperently it was owned by a collector and sold in Novemeber 2003 to the guy who sold it to me.
He says he barely used it, his loss, hehe.

But what intrigues me is that it is a '79 in Ruby, and from what I gather Ruby wasn't available... I don't seem to be able to see the woodgrain.
Someone should be able to explain this...

Patrick: I consider that your instrument proves that Ruby was around in 1979. You can't see the woodgrain because of the sliver undercoat. I think you got a good buy and have a treasure here.

Peter: So the silver undercoat hides the woodgrain? Is this what they do with the color Midnight Blue? The blue also has a metallic look to it similar to the Ruby photo above.

Different color primers change the appearance of the finished color (at least this is true with cars)

Yes James, the silver base coat was used on several finishes including Ruby, Midnightblue and also Silver.

So was Silver a silver base coat and clearcoat?

Yes, exactly.

The basecoat is a critical step in many finishes.

For example, many classic Fender finishes from the 60s had a white basecoat known as Fullerplast. It's critical to the finished appearance to get the basecoat right. Lake Placid Blue is an example, an LPB refin that doesn't have the right Fullerplast undercoat just won't look right.

Fullerplast was a clearcoat. We used it up until it was discontinued in the late 1970's. It was used as a basic sealer as well, under the dye color coat. It was then used as the clearcoat.

This product was designated as "water white" even though perfectly clear- perhaps that's where there was some confusion about white basecoats.

It was also possible to pigment it, although it was rare to see it done that way.

I don't pretend to know anything about Fender's early finishes, but wasn't LPB a DuPont product through and through, rather than Fuller?

LPB was a Dupont auto color, I believe it was a Cadillac color in the late 1950s.

Fullerplast was once used as an undercoat by Fender and it's definitely clear, but there are some "vintage Fender" websites that mistakenly call it white.

The white base coat was white lacquer. Fender used white to save on color coats. Spraying custom colors over a consistant white body saved the custom color paint because it took less to cover the body. I guess Fender did the math and figured that the extra step was cheaper than the paint.

I ran across the term "water white" when I worked at Lehn & Fink Products (former manufacturer of the Lysol brand products, among others) in the late 1970s. It was used to describe clear, colorless liquid raw materials, and it sounded odd to me, too ("... but water isn't white! ...").

I've run into other examples in the chemical industry where color terminology left somthing to be desired. One example is "emerald green" used to describe the color at the endpoint of a particular titration for epoxy resins (I don't remember the details). I saw three chemists run the titration, and each time the color was a slightly different shade of green. Makes a strong case for switching from manual titration to an autotitrator that senses the endpoint electronically.

Now, I bet that was more information than anyone cared to have!