HOW COME SOME TRUSS COVERS HAVE THE MODEL NUMBERS ON THEM AND SOME DONT SO HOW CAN YOU TELL WHICH MODEL YOUR BUYING

They made the truss rod covers with the model numbers on it for a while in the 80s or so. Now they say "Made in USA".

Why did they stop? Probably because its easier and cheaper to have a small number of standardized parts. Without the model number, they still need to stock a lot of different types of truss rod covers: guitar/bass X right-handed/left-handed X white/black = 8 combinations, plus whatever combinations they need for the vintage and C models, which I don't believe have "Made in USA". Now imagine the number of different TRCs required with the model number on it; its a production nightmare. In order to ship a low production volume variant such as a left-handed 370 they'd essentially need to have the TRCs custom produced, and they'd either need to overstock enough on hand to ensure they could finish and ship such guitars or risk getting stuck waiting for want of the TRC. Instead, they only need to stock enough left-handed guitar TRCs (for example) to cover all left-handed guitars produced, regardless of model (excluding V/C models and models with black TRCs).

As for identifying the model of a given guitar, you pretty much need to go by features. Modern models are pretty easy to identify- identify the family (300, 600, 4000) and whether it is "basic" (no binding, dot markers, mono:330-340, 620), "deluxe" (binding, triangle inlay markers, stereo: 360-370, 660), one of the humbucker models (650, 380, 4004), number of pickups (3 pups for 340, 370) and number of strings (*/12 and */5). Other than distinguishing the various flavors of 650s and 4004s, that should pretty much peg it.

LMoE

At least on the basses they started sometime in 1972 or likely earlier as I have a 72 that says 4001 on it, it's original. I also have 78, 79 4001's and an 81 4003 with TRC's with the model number on them.

As far as identifying models, why not just go here:

http://www.rickenbacker.com/identification.asp

I only found (re-discovered) this site last week. Just for fun I gave the ident program all the info I could remember about my 360/12V64. It couldn't identify the guitar! I tried giving it less info (blanking out anything I wasn't sure of, then things I knew for certain), but still nothing.

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Today it found the V64 and C63 with no trouble, so I guess that was me... ;-) But could those body silhouettes have more descriptive names please?

[Love the site, BTW. And this edit facility is brilliant]