Me and my old friend Rick....

[southpaw]

I got a couple of them, one just like hieronymous. A Rick is always a nice addition to any collection. Flats on one for an old school McCartney sound, rounds on the other.

[hieronymous]

Here are my other two:
 
 
 
Would love to get an Alembic 8-string one day...

[eligilam]

Harry, that eight-string is awesome...
 
My dream Rics-to-be-obtained list includes:
 
1.  Blackstar
2.  Lemmy signature model
3.  4080 doubleneck
 
Of course, the dream Alembics-to-be-obtained list is much longer...

[hifiguy]

By the time I'd been playing bass only a few months I had a brand spanking new '72 Fireglo Ric 4001 w/checkerboard binding and a toaster at the neck.  I HAD to have one because my hero Chris Squire played one.  I played that Ric pickstyle with Rotosounds for nearly twenty years.
 
Discovered Jaco (very late, in the early 1990s) and moved to playing a Vintage Series Jazz and a Warwick Corvette fingerstyle and consigned the Ric at Willie's in St. Paul in '93.  Never missed it until the last few months.  Eventually the Warwick went away after I bought my Stanley Sig Standard in '99. Bought a Schecter 5-string from Danno last winter because I had a craving for a five and couldn't afford an Alembic.  Started working up my pickstyle chops on the fiver and immediately began jonesing for a Ric again.  
 
Gonna have to do something about that in the next dozen or so moons....  I love Rics, but you gotta check the neck as they are so variable.  My '72 was a wide, very shallow D-shape, which was perfect.  Others have seemed a lot more baseball bat-like.
 
I'd consider having a toe removed for a Squire Signature 4001S.

[white_cloud]

I owned two Rick 4001's at seperate times in the dim distant past...the first being only the second bass I ever owned.  
 
I loved them both dearly. For me nothing sounds like a Rick, they have a certain charisma & tonal (although limited) characteristic all of their own. The Rick combined with fresh Rotosounds always gave that classic twang.
 
The Fender jazz seemed to be able to sit in any style of music - the Rick never quite had that versatility.
 
I traded my first for a Wal custom, still miss it but it wouldnt really fit in with the kind of stuff I play nowadays :-(

[benson_murrensun]

My 4001 Squire model had dot inlays in the fingerboard. Seems like most Rics have the shark tooth inlays.

[hifiguy]

The Squire models were replicas of the export model, the 4001S, which is the famous Ric Chris played in Yes for so many years.  Those had an unbound fretboard and dot markers.  Squire worked at the importer in his pre-Yes days and bought one of the basses when Ric started shipping them to the UK.

[benson_murrensun]

That explains that. Thanks. Also, mine was mono, seems like most Ric basses are stereo. I find the 4005 Rics very appealing but not the prices they fetch these days!

[hifiguy]

Yep, that was the other difference - 4001S models were mono, no Rick-O-Sound.  McCartney's Ric is also a 4001S.

[hieronymous]

One other difference - the S series doesn't have binding on the body or neck. Some people find that the binding on the body of the 4001/4003 bites into their arm and prefer the 4003S - I never had that problem.
 
For a while, I owned what for me was a Holy Grail of Rics: a 4008. It's kind of halfway between a 4001 & a 4001S - it has dot position markers and no body binding, like a 4001S, but it has binding on the neck and the Rick-o-sound (stereo) option like a 4001! Other goodies are the rare 2-piece neck (recently reintroduced) and two extra screws in the tailpiece. Wish I didn't have to sell it but you know how things go...