The Electra Forums

Wonderful find! Rare and excellent guitar!

I think what's happening with your trem is that the threads are stipped. The arm looks stock to me, and it's a very standard thread pitch (6x1.00) - a standard metric trem arm should be a direct replacement.

But what happens is the mild steel of the trem arm is harder than the pot metal of the cast bridge block. The hole was originally only threaded partway down - which meant you could tighten the arm more and more, change the position at which it was 'all the way in'. That's fine but if you keep going inward eventually the rod bottoms out inside the hole and then the threads get cut away.

I'd suggest a 'cheap and dirty fix' such as putting jbweld in the hole, greasing the trem and threading it in. (Old motorcyclist's trick for dealing with stripped threads in castings). Even quicker and cheaper, slightly less sure, but far safer and less intrusive would be to take two or three copper strands from some stranded wire, and slip those into the hole with the trem, so they lay across the threads. This can give enough to let the arm's threads catch and hold again.

You could also try putting a little teflon plumbers tape on the threads of the arm. This can help stop it from cross threading on good threads and hold it snug if you don't have enough good threads.

I had a replacement arm for mine, and the threaded section was not as long on the arm, but it worked. I removed that bushing all together and cleaned out the hole in the block with a little flat bladed screw driver. Afterwards I had to do the same thing, I had to lower that threaded bushing into the hole so my my arm could thread lower into the overall bridge block. Then, I put one of those little "strat" style springs in the block and tried to thread the arm in like a strat. This is done to tension the arm in the block so that you can move it without bottoming out and it will stay in place and not wobble. Well, the strat style spring was a bit too long, so I cut in in about half. Now it works very well.

On a side note:

I thought I might have found a source for the bridge saddles for a bendmaster bridge. There is a hard tail "Squier 51" replacement bridge GFS sells that has three of the six saddles that resemble the bendmaster saddles. I know it sounds like a waste to buy a bridge with the possibility of only using 3 saddles off of it, but still, if you need the saddles you need them. I do not know if it works or not. And luckily I don't need the saddles. I just saw it, and thought those saddles look just like the ones on the bendmaster. It might be something someone can investigate if they have a bendmaster that needs saddles, and they can report back if it works. What do you think?

http://store.guitarfetish.com/topmohabrfit1.html

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Thorny

Nice find Thorny! Would be curious myself as to if those saddles could just slide in to a Bendmaster.

Thanks for all the tips guys. So far, she's holding together OK, but if it starts to go south, I have plenty of ideas to try!