Was that a real Rick? The horns look wider, but it might be the viewing angle. It seems wierd that the original owner would fill in the neck pickup cavity.
I puzzled endlessly over whether it's a genuine Rickenbacker or a clone. There was so little left of it that it was hard to tell. The neck rout in particular seemed really weird....If you look close, you can see that the rout is right at the end of the body, almost shaped around the end of the neck. I know that can't be right because all of the basses I looked at online when I was making the pickguard seem to have the guard butting up against the end of the neck.....This one, I actually had to extend the guard slightly around the heel of the neck in order to cover the rout. That seems wrong to me, and the actual rout itself was pretty crude and appeared to cut into the structural part of the neck tenon where it extends into the body.
I have a suspicion that whoever hacked the hole for the neck pickup realized belately that they'd located it too far forward and weakened the structure and that's why that hole had been patched. When I rerouted the cavity for the neck pickup, I moved it further away from the neck.
There are two possibilities, I think.....One, perhaps it's a clone and that's why it's non-standard....Or, two, maybe it was a 4000 that somebody tried to add a neck pickup to. There were so many things that were kinky about the bass.....As I mentioned, there was an original bridge that somebody had hack-sawed the mute off. The bridge had been remounted further forward and the original bridge saddle unit had been removed from the baseplate, and replaced by a different style of saddle carriage that had been mounted by drilling holes for a couple of screws.
You can also see that someone butchered a shallow cavity in the body right in front of the old half-bridge and I never understood why. There were lots of unanswered questions I had about why so many of these things had been done.
I've discovered that when I start a "rescue mission", there are almost always surprises, and this was a classic example. More than once I had regrets about taking the project on as I discovered more and more strange mods that had been done with no apparent justification.
The payoff in the end was that it plays as well as the new 4001 I owned in 1976, but definitely sounds much better......The varitone was an excellent upgrade. It's certainly not perfect, but I was fairly happy with the result.
