Short Takes: 1970 360
Time to rewrite my 360 transition timeline…
My deep and abiding love for transitional-era (click to learn more) 360s is well documented in these pages. In the archives you can find “Short Takes” on an early bound headstock 1970 360 (click to learn more), a modified 1971 360 (click to learn more), a 1972 360SF (click to learn more), and I even attempted to build a comprehensive timeline of the 360’s transition (click to learn more). Or at least I thought I had. This guitar renders that timeline obsolete.
According to my timeline, the first 360 with a 24 fret neck and first-gen Higains (click to learn more) appeared in April 1970. The first bound headstock (click to learn more) 360 appeared in June 1970. Yet this guitar—from March 1970—has all of those features. And then there’s that fingerboard.
Rickenbacker had built a handful of guitars with ebony fingerboards before—like the 1968 366/12OS you can read about here. And there are similarities between these two guitars: both featured unfinished ebony fingerboards with—unusually—bound fingerboard ends. But those position markers are something entirely new.
Large pearloid dot markers like this had not appeared on any Rickenbacker before, although they appear to foreshadow the markers found on the fretless 4001FL (click to learn more) in 1972. But this guitar still has one more unique feature.
Not only is this the first 360 with a bound headstock I’ve run across—“production” bound headstocks wouldn’t appear until June 1970—it’s the only 360 with a headstock bound with checkered binding I’ve ever seen.
The 1968 6006 Banjoline had featured a single-ply checkered bound headstock, as had a prototype 381 (click to learn more) from the same year. As so would the 1971 Mando Guitars. But all other 360s built with bound headstocks featured single ply white binding.
Now all this assumes these features are original, and I believe they are. The current owner has owned it since he bought it “new” in 1975, and the fingerboard and headstock are consistent with features that appeared both before and shortly afterward.
So what is it? Why is it? We’ll likely never know for sure, but there was a lot of experimentation with the 360 during this period, and this simply appears to be one of those experiments that escaped into the wild. And that’s why I love transitional-era 360s—you quite literally never know what you’re going to get.
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Hi Andy
Thanks for the great write up on my 360. This guitar has puzzled me for the last 50 years during which time I have been told it’s a fake and doesn’t exist as rickenbacker didn’t make one offs and having never seen one the same didn’t know what to think one things for sure when you plug it in it sounds awesome.
Yes I did replace the tuners with Schallers back in 75 as the originals made it difficult to keep in tune
Cool, but that board prob isn't original... binding is 'too thick', look at the nut, and 'too square' on the edges, look at the side pic of the nut. And the finishing of the binding at the nut isn't the quality RIC was doing then. Ask him to send you a photo of the fret-ends - is the binding over the end like it should be? The ratio of binding to board on the side of the neck looks off compared to what they were doing at the time also...
And would those tuners be correct for 1970? I thought they would be later on...
With that said, if it is orig, I'm not sure the position markers are something new - they look the same as what was on the '68 dot-360s with the ebony boards... The other '68 dot-360s (w/out the ebony) had the normal unbound 330 board/dots (and unbound everything actually - a "360 that wasn't deluxe")....