Up for grabs, my Fakenbacker. A product of Japan in the 70's, I don't know who originally made it but the previous owner thought it might be a Greco. It does have a real Rickenbacker "Made In USA" truss rod cover, but the engraved neckplate (yeah it's bolt-on) on the rear states it's true origin. Oh yeah, it's serial number is 767847, whatever that tells ya.
Double truss rods. Quality binding on the body & neck. At one point this was a real nice look-alike. Requisite chips and dings around the edges for this vintage...but not too bad. One relatively large chip near the side input jack but it's not very noticeable. A solidly-built 9.97 lbs. But let's talk about the mods. No, I am not responsible for any of them.
First of all, it's been defretted. And a real nice job of it too, I suspect it was done pro because I've never personally seen an amateur defret look this good. The inlays are much darker than they should be so I suspect the fingerboard was stained in the process.
Second of all, it's got active EMG jazz pickups in it. They sound pretty good but, of course, not very Ric-like. From what I can see it looks like they didn't need to do much to get them to fit in there (aside from a little pickguard routing) so it would probably be easy to put original-style pickups back in. Personally I kinda like the look of the jazz style in there...I would have gone with black pickups instead of white...but if you didn't know how it originally looked, these appear pretty organically normal. Especially if they were black.
When the pickups were installed, whoever did it had no respect for genteel society when wiring it up. It's got the usual two-input jack on the side (featuring "Stereo Sound") but it's not wired in, oh no no. Instead, one tone knob controls both pickups, and the space formerly occupied by tone #2 is now an input jack. There's also a pickup selector switch that's not wired in.
Two of the knobs match and one doesn't, three of the tuners match and one doesn't. The pickguard looks like it was spray painted black.
Okay, that's it for the weirdness. Really it's not that bad. It's perfectly playable the way it is, sounds and feels great. By sourcing some parts from eBay you could easily bring it back to being a great Ric-alike. Personally I would just replace the pickup covers with black, get matching knobs and tuners, and have a real sinister-looking black-on-black rock machine.
Comes with a vintage hard case that is overall in good shape, but the latches are shot. As-is it's good enough for storage but I wouldn't use it to carry it around.
PRICE DROP - $425 shipped., paypal, CONUS. Now open to trades, something in a 4-string passive. More photos available
here.
