I'm building a guitar to replace a friends "wish I hadn't sold that one". It was a partscaster with a tele bod and strat neck. It had a very unusual, and so far, completely unfindable bridge that you can kind of see in this blurry photo. The bridge was a humbucking cut tele style, but had a closer placement of the PU to the saddles than stock. If you look close, you can see that the plate is a bit longer and amount of metal at the neck end is wider. He swears that this bridge said 'music man' on it, but I've not been able to find any tele style bridge with that inscription. I saw the original scan yesterday, and it shows some things that are not seen in this (sorry) crappy pic. In the original scan, it looks like the bridge is thick, chunky brass and has beveled corners. First question is; anyone seen this bridge on any axe at all, or where we can get it? All thoughts, no matter how fuzzy, are welcome.
Slight digression here. I recently made an original (?) strat mod I call the 'Coyote Dancer'.
http://www.strat-talk.com/forum/non-...antbucker.html
It involves moving the middle coil down next to the bridge and wiring the two up as a 'slantbucker'. A mini on/on/on toggle chooses either single coil, series or parallel for the slantbucker, and a five position 'mega switch' gets; Neck alone, neck and slant in parallel, neck and slant in series (15k), neck and slant in series out of phase, and slantbucker alone for a total of 13 sounds that range from thin biting single to fat, creamy, compressed HB. In searching for my friends bridge, I stumbled upon the John Jorgenson model 'hellecaster' which has a custom bridge that accepts two single coils on a slant wired as a humbucker. This youtube vid shows him switching the sounds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzF9FDIcz3w
The sound of the bridge humbucker sounds almost exactly like my coyote dancer.
Ok, back to the project at hand. A bit more searching turns up the Rio Grande Twangbucker bridge and pickup. If you're not familiar with this setup, it's a tele style bridge similar to what you see on the JJ 'hellecaster', but it looks to me like the pickups are even closer to the bridge, which we want.
http://www.warmoth.com/catalog/produ...ducts_id=26997
My friend could probably be convinced to go with the Twangbucker arrangement if it's the only thing we can find, but we'd prefer to buy the bridge and mount our own coils. The reason is not so much to save money, but to have more control over the type, quality and balance of the two coils. Second question is; Does anyone know where we can get a tele style bridge, like the RioGrande kind, only without the pickups?