BRIDGE OF SIGHS

While our mainly recycled build cracks on at a pedestrian pace, Dave Burrluck pauses to ponder that old chestnut: the offset bridge

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Back in issue 518 I kicked off a collaborative domestic build with Jason Snelling at Maybury Guitars. To be fair, ‘collaboration’ is used in its loosest sense as Jason did the hard work, creating a cool body from recycled timbers, turning a paddle headstock kit neck into a ready-to-finish masterpiece, and laying out all the geometry. All I had to do was load in the offset bridge and thimbles, mount the Bigsby into pre-drilled holes then fit the Sunbear BearTrons and wire it up. Once everything is all working I can worry about a finish. Thanks to Jason, things were all looking good, and thanks to Stuart Robson at Sunbear Pickups, even though I was still a few sandwiches short in the setup hamper, it’s sounding a lot better than it actually plays.

Rather stupidly, however, I pinged a shot of the build thus far over to a modding mate to which he simply replied, “Oh, I’d have thought you would have put a Mastery bridge on that.” While I explained the point of the build was centred around recycling, he’d planted a seed that I couldn’t get out of my head. See, as wonderful as the original Fender offset design is/was, the bridge (and the way it’s set up) has always been a bit of a weak spot, not least that the whole bridge and vibrato system was conceived at a time of heavy gauge, flat-wound strings [pics 1 & 2].

As is, I don’t have quite enough height at the bridge, so a pretty simple neck shim is on the cards. While that’s no problem, I didn’t want to set up the guitar with a bridge that, well, has its issues. By design, it’s supposed to slightly rock back and forwards as you move the vibrato, and with relatively little behind the bridge string angle, the strings can easily slip across the saddles, which are threaded steel rods, with an outer diameter of 7mm without a central saddle groove.