Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

I want to have my guitar guy make me a new nut for my 12 string with the wider spacing, but I want it to be the same material as the standard RIC nut.

What is the material? And does anyone have a blank nut?

Or know where I can get one?

blakelite ... that is a sort of plastic ... as per blanks ... If blanks are available I'll take some blank bass nuts ...

The real stuff is a vulcanized cotton phenolic .

I have some .

Actually, it's Bakelite, named after the inventor, Bakeland...it's one of the original pre-WWII plastics and an excellent insulator. A nice compromise between a brass nut (remember those?) and one of nylon or Cortron. (Call me Mr. pedantic...)

How could I get 2 of these blanks?

Mike Parks has them for sale on his site, not sure if they are blanks, or pre-slotted look under Plastics here: Mike Park's Place Ric Spares

Thank you everyone! Problem solved!

Vulcanized Phenolic is the accual material we used at Electro. Somewhat a little different from Bakelite. It had cotton as a base that held the phenolic material together. I must have fitted thousands of these things in the 70's. It gives off a nice stinky aroma when sanded to size.
We'd get this stuff in sheets, then cut it to size
on the saw. Early Ricks used the thicker size same as the Bass, then early 60's switched to the thinner for guitars while keeping the thick material for the Bass. Most places that carry commercial grades of engraving sign material carry this or can order it for you.

A lot of the old plastic tube radios are made of bakelite, and weren't the old Ric steels also made of it? I like the old nuts much better than the new ones.

As Larry Mondello, said, it's called phenolic. Believe it or not, it was once used for printed circuit boards before fiberglass became more common. Also for telephones (the old black and dark brown phones of the '50s and before) and electrical insulators, small table radio cabinets, etc. My old Lionel train transformer from 1955 had a Bakelite case. Very dense, rigid and brittle, hence the cotton lamination layers.

It is still available in sheet form from many sources, but unfortunately every piece I've seen recently is a reddish-brown color, almost the same as a Rick fretboard!

It can be cut on any tablesaw, but a sharp carbide 120T blade is needed to prevent burning. You know the smell as "that electrical burning smell". When cut, the cotton laminations can be seen in the cross-sectional area.

Bakelight is phenolic formaldehyde, (phenol and formaldehyde mixed) I guess you can add various materials including cotton to bakelite to improve it's properties.

The reason cotton is layered in there is the same reason that glass fiber is layered into a mold which has been wetted with either polyester, polyurethane, or epoxy resin to make fiberglass...it's to improve impact resistance. Uncottoned (unreinforced) bakelite will shatter with impact. Cottoned will crack but with a much greater impact.

To bring this full-circle, sort of, cottoned phenolic can be used for a nut, same as unreinforced. Nice stuff and a good application for it, IMO.

Yeah, but can you preserve a corpse with it?....

You can make a corpse with it more easily. Trust me, I work at a plastic injection molding factory, and with some of the fumes I've smelled, I'm suprised I'm not dead yet!!!

Nobody molds bakelite anymore, or do they? I haven't heard much of it in recent times.

I made at least five different nuts for my 360/12, each of different material. I tried ebony, Tusq, plastic, and bakelite, before finally settling on cow bone. The bone nut was more forgiving to work with. The Tusq nut was OK but didn't add enough brightness in the end. The ebony nut was very difficult to work with because the end "E" slots end up very close to the edges and while cutting the slots, the nut edges would sometimes break off. I actually did the spacing template on AutoCAD design/drafting software and it worked out perfectly.