Mastery Bridge on my Hallmark 60 Custom

User avatar
Gary67
Active Member
Posts: 72
Joined: Tue Jan 04, 2011 4:17 pm
Location: Buffalo, New York
Contact:

Mastery Bridge on my Hallmark 60 Custom

Postby Gary67 » Thu May 16, 2013 11:23 am

Hello!

Here are a few pictures I took of my new Mastery bridge on my Hallmark 60 Custom.
I had an issue with the strings popping out of the saddles when I played lead parts with the original Hallmark bridge. This happened because I tend to play heavy on the strings. There were two fixes that I came up with, play lighter ;) or custom fit a Jaguar/Jazzmaster style Mastery bridge onto the Hallmark. Tha Mastery offset M1 bridge is used in conjunction with their recommended thimbles, which look great and add contact surface when installed on a Jaguar or Jazzmaster guitar. After I received both items from Mastery and started to take off the Hallmark bridge I saw my unexpected problem:

Image

The post holes are not the same. And it would have been a huge undertaking on my part to remove the Hallmark thimbles, fill in the holes, re-drill new holes for the Mastery thimbles and then try to touch up paint the fantastic original finish from Hallmark. :(

So after eyeing up the issue I thought I had enough room on the Mastery bridge to reset/re-center the holes to match the Hallmark posts. I am fortunate to live near Buffalo, NY where there are a bunch of machine shops that could do this task way better than me and my hand drill! :o
It was difficult to find a shop that wanted to take the time to understand my issue. After a bunch of calls I was very lucky to find Merz Metal & Machine Corp. in Buffalo and had a great conversation with their owner Dave Nieman who took the time to listen! He said that he wasn't really set up to do this type of work but knew someone just down the street that was. Kris at St. John Machine was able to do it, and does FANTASTIC work! It was funny, I was there going over what was need on this little guitar bridge when in walked one of Kris's regular customers with a very large pipe fitting and said that he had to use a fork lift truck to get it off of the pipe! I felt very small in comparison!! :lol:
Kris got the Mastery bridge back to me in under a few days and it works great!

Image

Image


Image

And an added bonus is that if I ever (Ha! Not ever likely!!) wanted to part with my Hallmark, I can just put the original Hallmark bridge back onto the guitar!

My thanks to both Bob Shade at Hallmark and John (JW) at Mastery Bridge for both of their help, time and guidance!
:D

~Gary

Return to “Mosrite & Clone, Projects, Parts & Accessories Q&A”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 66 guests