Short Takes: 2012-2013 “Upside-Down” F-Holes

Oops!

The reissue 1997 was produced from 1987 to 2001. The 1993Plus entered production in 2015. In between, there were no standard-production Rickenbacker models with a Rose Morris-style f-hole.

They built a lot of Rose Morris 1996s in between, though, with sizeable special runs in 2006, 2008, and 2014. So it’s almost understandable what happened…but it’s still unfortunate.

Okay, this is going to be super-inside baseball, but it’s also one of those “once you see it you can’t unsee it” things. There were two different f-holes used on the 1996 over its lifetime. Here’s the first one, the so-called “2 o’clock” f-hole:

1964 1996

That’s what the f-hole looked like on the short-scale Capris from their launch in 1958 up through June of 1964—including the first several production batches of the Rose Morris 1996.

We refer to it as a “2 o’clock” f-hole because…well, imagine a clock face. Where is the upper end of the f-hole pointing? About 2 o’clock.

In July 1964 they changed it to “1 o’clock” to match all the other Rose Morris models.

July 1964 1996

Only there was more to the change than just slightly rotating the template. It was, in fact, a completely different template. Let’s inspect both of those f-holes closely.

At the top we have our 2 o’clock hole; at the bottom is our 1 o’clock. Look at the “points” in the middle of the f-hole. They’re in completely different places!

Let’s look at them side by side.

Left: 2 o’clock. Right: 1 o’clock

If you look at our 2 o’clock 1996 on the left, you’ll see that those two “points” are more or less level when the guitar is held upright. If you do the same with the 1 o’clock 1996 on the right, the “point” on the outside is a little bit higher than the one on the inside. This is how the f-hole appears on all Rose Morris guitars with a 1 o’clock f-hole.

But, just for fun, let’s take our 2 o’clock f-hole and rotate it to 1 o’clock.

2 o’clock f-hole rotated to 1 o’clock

Burn that image into your memory. It’s going to be important in a minute.

Okay, that was a lot of setup. Let’s move into the payoff.

Remember, Rickenbacker made zero production guitars with a 1 o’clock f-hole between 2002 and 2014. But in 2012 they built two special runs—one for the UK market, and one for the US market, and they wanted to do something different. Something that wasn’t a Rose Morris reproduction, but had a Rose Morris f-hole. Here’s the UK offer (click to learn more):

2012 Pearl White 2012

And here’s the US offer:

2012 Tobaccoglo 330S

I mean, both of them have so much going on you might not notice it at first, but look at those f-holes.

Somebody grabbed the wrong template.

Here’s where it gets even more embarrassing. A few months earlier they built a bound Rose Morris 1998 and a 1993—one of less than ten 1993 reproductions built since the 1960s originals—for Tom Petty to take out on the road. Did they use the right template on those?

2012 Tom Petty 1998 and 1993

They did not. Whoever built those guitars appears to have introduced the wrong template—and nobody noticed.

At least one more guitar turned up with the wrong template—a 2013 Sea Green 330S/12 sold through the Rickenbacker Boutique. And before you ask, no, it wasn’t a leftover/overrun from the 2012 special runs—those had 21 frets and this one had 24.

2013 330S/12

When the collector community spotted the anomaly, they named it “the upside-down f-hole” because the “points” appear backwards from the correct 1 o’clock template. The highest “point” is on the outside on the correct template and the inside on the wrong template. But “upside-down” isn’t what’s really going on here. It’s just the wrong template.

Somebody at the factory finally noticed by 2014. That year, a special run of 24-fret 330-Fs was built for UK distributor Rosetti with the correct 1 o’clock template. From that point on, it’s all been good.

2014 330-F

If you didn’t already know about this little oopsie, you probably would have never noticed if I hadn’t pointed it out. But now that I have, I promise you can’t unsee it!