Now to dub Josh’s voice in…
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Turns out it’s actually a December '72, but still good by me.
I have been talking to the guy who sold it to me who is a very active seller and knowledgable dude about Ricks. I have the 411 on how to do it, not bad at all, but going to wait until the lotions and potions come that all the Rick people say to use and only to use (Swirl-X, used to be Scratch-X but the formula changed so now its Swirl-X and Zymol polish) and will clean from top to bottom, swap bridges & strings and set up.
I ain’t afraid of no truss rods.
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So, here it is. My newused 2013 Fender American Deluxe Dimension IV. It arrived on the 9th, I’ve spent the last two days showering it with heavy doses of TLC. I swapped in a custom pickguard from WD Music and a Zero Mod thumb rest.
Coming soon, I really think I’d like to swap out the chrome knobs for black. We’ll see. 
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Hello Everyone!
Here is my Squire 70s Jazz Bass that I purchased about a month ago. I have been enjoying playing it so far. I am a total newbie to bass guitar. I played drums when I was younger and I am enjoying the challenge of learning a new instrument in my 40s.
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That’s exactly how I started off @lesliwalsh1 . . . great bass guitar! . . .
Welcome aboard and good luck with it . . . 
Cheers
Joe
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Last week we got bonuses at work (a nice surprise) so of course I had to get a new bass. It showed up yesterday. A 2015 Ibanez SR1905. It has an ash body with a rosewood top and back, a rosewood fingerboard, a 5 piece wenge-bubinga neck, and Nordstrand Big Single pickups. I think it looks gorgeous and it sounds great.
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Wow that looks fantastic!
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Thanks @howard! It was definitely the best looking bass on my Reverb watch list. 
Also, the way the bridge saddles work made for the easiest string change ever.
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That’s sure purdy!
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That looks damned near perfect!
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So I did some disassembly and bridge swapping on “Joe” the Mapleglo.
Apparently back then, the people that built the guitar wrote their names in the various cavities.
Some Googling later, found some pretty damn cool stuff.
- Mark Anquist was the guy in charge back then of the finishing shop, body finishing, fretwork, etc. He actually led the restoration of Paul McCartney’s Rick when it came in in 1975 before the Wings Over America tour. I tracked him down on facebook and messaged him about the bass. He said it was a custom job for one of the Rickenbacker staffers, and not to be misled that it was done for “Dave Mason” - one of the names under the bridge, he was just a guy at Rickenbacker with the same name.
He had to run to dinner but will ask him later about neck and fretboard wood and other things that are not standard.
About what he did to McCartney’s bass…
Mark Arnquist worked at the Rickenbacker factory "from July 1972 to October 1976. I was the lead man in charge of the area from when the instruments came into the finishing building until [owner] F.C. Hall picked them up in a van in the afternoon. I worked on most of the instruments to be repaired in that time frame, and if there was a need for structural or any fret work, I got the job.
“The P.M. bass came back to the factory prior to the ‘Wings over America tour.’ It needed some help. The original cast bridge was cracked, and the saddle assembly rattled and was sagging. The horseshoe magnets were dead. The coil was fine, but the cobalt magnets – stone dead. The frets needed some serious dressing and a new nut. (He has played around with a zero fret extension over the years, and the bass originally had a stock nut) . . . The finish was nothing at all. It had the patina of dirty wood and sweat. It didn’t stink of armpits, but it was not sealed, and we actually discussed sealing for him. We decided not to, as we were already doing work that was not asked for.”
And then there was the do-it-yourself sanding job . . .
“The whole bass was not stripped by a professional at all. There were plenty of hack marks and sandpaper gouges . . . The horns just appeared to have been scraped and sanded too much. The front and the back were fairly well done but all of the edges and contours were done amateurishly . . . The bass was definitely his; the original Fire-glo was still in the routes, and under the pickguard there was still some finish.”
The Rickenbacker doctors operate
"The team that worked on it was four guys: Arlo (given name Howard, I cannot rememmber his last name) in the electronics area; Joel Heline in check out; Gene Garbis in woodshop/fretting, and myself at the assembly bench and at the buffing area. We had a gathering of minds, and after sending the cobalt magnets out for charging we got the bad news that they would not hold a charge. Bill Myers (plant manager) gathered us and we discussed our options.
*"We opted for a custom coil/pickup for ‘The Man.’ The idea was to overwind a stock coil for a 4001. This is what he got. The tailpiece was replaced with a new casted piece and saddle assembly. The saddles were cut/spaced using calipers, not the normal eyeball method, and the saddles were buffed to a high sheen.!
he fret work was done by Gene, and then I got the bass after it came back into the finishing building. I leveled and buffed them, then assembled it. Joel was the next to get it, and he made a bone nut for it. There were some blanks left over in Bill’s desk, and one of them was used. Then it was filed and restrung with the strings that it came in with . . . [McCartney] only sent it in to get the horseshoe pickup fixed. We took it upon ourselves to do all this work.
“This group was really into this job. Lots of love and care went into what we did. After a few of the staff looked at it, Jim Ruthledge (the only lefty bassist in the factory) played it. He loved what we had done. And off it went.”
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Cool story
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…I might have a new bass to show Soon 
the tracking number for that Soviet-era bass I tried to buy from Ukraine (less than two hours from the fighting, and I’m pretty sure the shop owner fled because it changed to “on vacation”) the day before Russia invaded updated on the 12th, and today o.O I had given up on it lol. Just hoped maybe the money made a difference in someone getting out of there.
USPS: neither rain, nor sleet, nor snowy weather…
Ukrainian Post: bitch, we deliver during wartime.
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so i need to welcome back to my family junior! (enclosed is stock ibby mikro bass pix because i’m at work right now). there is a story behind this, that i wasn’t sure i was going to tell.
as some of you might know, i used to have this bass and love the hell out of it. about a year ago i sold it and posted in the short love thread that i would have something special soon. what had happened was i am in a facebook group for ubass players. about a year ago a luthier named dave martinez/deybeat customs posted that he had this ubass (ukelele sized bass) for sale in the group:
a few of the members ordered some custom made ubass’s from him (he’s in mexico). so i started conversing with him on making me a custom ubass in the scale of the mikro, a mini version of my bongo. a deposit was made and he said it would take about a month. well, as you can guess, ONE YEAR later he tells me it is finally done. i have pix of it so it existed. i paid for the remaining balance, and… never received it. eventually he stopped responding to any of my PM’s to him. i posted the news in the ubass forum and another member responded with this:
"One of David’s big problems was not having enough capital to ship, he’s one of those who takes from Peter to pay Paul and not have anything left. When he came to the end of my build, which was a few months late, I paid him an extra $100 just it get it shipped express, which still took a few weeks. "
when i reported what had happened in the ubass thread within minutes i got a flurry of PM’s from david, saying he had saw the response, and that he just needed more time, and blamed it all on covid, and said he “understood my feelings, it is fair” 
one of the things that pisses me off the most is that david has just blatantly lied throughout this whole process when things aren’t going as he said they would.
i told him i would no longer worry about this and to do whatever he felt is right. i really wish i had a moral to my story here. i knew i was taking a chance when i started this and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t.
but now i’m thinking i need to pimp out junior.
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All I ever ask of people is to just be honest. I can smell a rat so far away (pun intended) and it really pisses me off when people not only lie, but then lie about lying. Happened today at work with a vendor who was underperforming. He answered all my questions like a politician at a debate - talking in a circle, no real answer. That and my other tell tale way to know if people are lying… any time anyone has more than one excuse/reason for something it’s generally a lie. You only need one reason for something…the honest one.
Hope you get something from him.
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thanx john. kinda my thing too, i’m a big boy i can handle the truth. just effing tell me.
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Sorry this happened to you. I have a similar story. I ordered pickups from someone, Jim Reed, and they never shipped. A long time later I called him and he seemed apologetic on the phone, agreed wow it had been a long time, and I got a tracking number in my email that day.
A tracking number that went fucking nowhere I wonder if using the USPS to generate false tracking labels constitutes mail fraud? 
What a piece of shit work.
The character of the person you are dealing with seems a little better based off the experiences of people from that Facebook group, at least. Jim Reed had a massive shitshow of a reputation on TalkBass several years ago.
I also gave Purism $600 for their Librem 5 smartphone in 2017 and never heard from them again. I emailed them about it, saying I was seeing people on Reddit getting their phones, and never heard from them. Some people/companies are just trash.
Anyway, I digress XD
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I cannot count the amount of times I have followed up on instrument repair related things, only to be ignored for weeks/months. Then, when I message them and say I am picking it up (sax or bass, happens with both) that day and taking it elsewhere, how it magically is the next thing on their bench or they are ‘in the middle of finishing it now’. I actually sat at a sax repair tech’s place until 9pm at night for him to finish (means start and do the whole job) so that the instrument came home.
Once you do this to me, I will never return.
One luthier runied a pickguard when trying to mod (I gave him 2 in case this happened plus I wanted color options) and he promised he had a replacement on order and would fix/finish the second one. That was last year. I will never see that pickguard and he will never see my business again.
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