Rickenbacker 4003 Bass Treble Pickup Bezel

This is a treble pickup bezel to fit Rickenbacker 4003 basses. It may fit other models like the 4003S but I can’t physically try this to confirm.

The Rickenbacker 4003 treble pickup cover may look cool and authentic, but it won’t be long before most players just can’t put up with it hindering their playing any longer and it has to be removed. It leaves an oversized gap around the pickup and an unsightly view of the pickup magnet. This bezel should cover and fill the gap.

I’ve tried to profile it to follow the shape of the outer chrome surround and make it a snug fit. I have also made the screw tabs align near the top. This allows the pickup height tension springs to sit under the tabs making this bezel push into place. Therefore, the pickup height adjustment can be made independently and this bezel won’t move with it. The downside is it means it has to be printed with supports, but these are minimal and any rough surface caused by these are internal and can’t be seen.

One issue is that I’m not sure how accurately the pickup coil assembly part is stuck onto the bar magnet. Mine was slightly angled and biased slightly in one direction. Now, I know it’s often deliberate to angle pickups, but this was so slight that I can’t see how it could possibly affect the tone. It may just be a quirk of the handmade manufacturing and there are some forum threads out there relating to this. The upshot of this is, I had to refine the angle and position of the coil aperture to fit over the coil on my bass as I wanted a snug fit. I’d like to think that all Rickenbackers are the same and maybe they use a tooling jig to make the pickups. But, in case the variation in coil placement is greatly different to mine, I have included an alternative version with a straight and larger coil aperture. Hopefully one of these two bezel designs will fit. For reference, my 4003 bass is a 2017-made instrument.