Rick replacement parts

[jongor]

I have in my possesion a friends '74 Rick, cool bass but it needs help. I told him I'd try and make it playable.

He's a drummer and it belonged to his now deceased brother, so it's been hang around in his basement for a loooong time.

The bridge parts are all kind of corroded, the height adjustment screws wont budge, and the foam mutes are fossilized.

The body has a dozen or so holes from a custom pickguard that has since been removed.

Here's the worst part....the neck is cracked, under the fingerboard about the distance of the first fret, both sides of the neck.

I'm going to have the neck break looked at by a luthier, but is there anywhere online to buy replacement parts for the bridge, or even a whole new bridge? The Rick website has a few parts, but no entire bridges.

[KPJ]

http://www.the-music-connection.com/ricpart.htm

Check out this site.

[Tbirdbassist]

Hipshot makes a replacement bridge.

[paul n]

Rhoads Music should be able to set you up with replacment bridge parts (bridge, mute etc...).

However, that crack in the neck looks bad, not unfixable, but bad. The thing that worries me is that that might be an example of the infamous "Popped-Fingerboard" that a few Ricks with old-style rods have had happen.

Ricks up untill the early 80's had an od design of truss-rod. They're esentialy two flat rods on top of each other, welded together at one end. At the other end, the bottom bar has a threaded rod welded to it and the tip of the top one is beveled. A larg rectangular washer made from bar stock is slipped over the threaded end of the bottom rod and a hex nut is threaded onto the threaded rod. The washer buts up agains the beveled tip of the upper rod, so that when you tighten the nut, the washer pushes on the upper rod. Since the two rods are welded together at the other end oposite the washer and nut, pushing on the upper rod causes the upper rod to push on the lowwer rod making the whole setup bend or arch back. Two of these asemblies (ie. two trussrods) are inserted into square slots running the length of the neck directly under the fingerboard.

The way the old rods work is the curve of the rods (from tightening the nuts) makes the neck bow back. This can cause two big problems. Acording to the old instruction manuals you're supposed to bend to neck back and tighten the rods down to match the neck position and hold it in place. You're not supposed to use the rods to move the neck. Most people over the years have ignored this bit of advice though. Two things can happen when the rod is adusted wrong. one is the what looks like happend to this one, the fingerboard is litteraly popped off by the trussrods pushing on it from behind. The other thing is bent ends. The rods are made of aluminum and if too much force is aplied to them, as happens when the rods are used to move the neck, the threaded ends can bend down to the point where you can nolonger fit a wrench over the end.

Basicaly I think that your finger board has been popped, also, I'd suggest checking the nuts on the trussrods and see if they're bent . Both can be fixed but it might be expensive.

Oh, by the way the trussrods can be removed, they just slide out of their chanels via the trussrod access at the string nut.

Hope I didn't babble on too much...

~Paul

[RickBlair]

You can try some PB Blaster penetrant (available at most auto parts stores) to loosen the bridge screws. It may several days of daily spraying to free things up but it should work. I've dismantled most of an old Corvette using PB and it's great stuff. Unfortunately PB won't help with the cracked neck.

Rick B.