The finest bridge for your Fender Jazzmaster, Jaguar, Mustang, Bass VI, & Telecaster with Bigsby Vibrato, and now Vintage Style Tele!
Exploded Bridge – Baseplate, saddle, mounting post with height adjustment screw, swivel, and vented screw. Not shown: saddle height adjustment screws, rear intonation screws, and intonation screw spring.
The patented Mastery Bridge is crafted and assembled in Minneapolis, MN, using the finest materials available. Each individual bridge is inspected and tested on a guitar before being shipped to you, to ensure the best possible performance. Every part of our bridge is made of the highest quality, non-corrosive materials to protect against any rust. Because we are currently such a small shop, the Mastery Bridge is only available through this website and is not available through any other online source or retailer. Please look over the descriptions of the various parts that go into the Mastery Bridge below. Easy step-by-step installation instructions for our original offset bridge can be found here.
Unlike the previous “rock post assembly” design, the mounting posts on the Mastery Bridge fit snug into the diameter of vintage and modern Fender-style thimbles, ensuring your bridge will not change position during performance or between string changes. Along with our unique saddle design, this feature also has a dramatic effect on the transfer of string-to-body energy, giving your guitar much greater resonance that you’ll even hear acoustically.
Mounting Posts – MIJ Post for thimbles aprox .315″, and USA Post for thimbles aprox .310″
Since the installation of the stock body thimbles can slightly vary from guitar-to-guitar, we’ve made our posts adjustable and removable via a vented 6-32 button head screw. The head screw contains a 1/16″ hole (the “vent”), allowing internal access to the adjustable bass/treble height screws. Like all other parts of the Mastery Bridge, the posts and screws are stainless and will not corrode.
Our M1 Mastery Bridge fits all new, used and vintage American made Fender guitars. Our M2 Mastery Bridge is the same bridge as our M1, but comes with an additional set of larger mounting posts required for most Japanese made guitars.
A close up of a completed saddle.
Our uniquely designed base is CNC water-cut from a solid 304 stainless steel sheet. We then tumble them in a coarse media to de-burr and break any sharp edges. The plate edges are then buffed on a wheel and hand straight-line sanded to a satin finish. After bending them to the specified profile, our logo and batch numbers are laser printed into the metal.
Our Tele baseplate is CNC water-cut from a solid 304 stainless steel sheet and stamped with our tooling to the specified profile. Each one is then tumbled to de-burr and break any sharp edges. Our logo is CNC engraved, followed by a lengthy process of hand straight-line sanding. The area above the pickup is then buffed to a mirror finish. Our baseplates blend well aesthetically on both vintage and new guitars.
The first 200 Tele Mastery Bridge baseplates have been consecutively serial numbered & CNC engraved on the top as a limited edition. On following Tele bridges, batch numbers are CNC engraved on the backside of the baseplate.
Tele Mastery Bridge
Please note: We currently do not offer American Standard or other style baseplates for the Tele Mastery Bridge. We do not offer the Offset Bridge with brass saddles and do not sell saddles individually. Brass saddles on any bridge will succumb to string wear over time and our brass saddle option Tele bridge (M3) is not warrantied against this sort of natural wear.
Drilling the Saddles
The patented Mastery Bridge features a unique saddle design not found on any previous guitar bridge. Four intonation-adjustment screws are used instead of six, allowing the string to freely go from the saddle to the vibrato without any chance of interference. Each saddle features two drop-in stainless swivels, permitting each of the individual intonation adjustment screws to work independently for precise intonation. The deep saddle string grooves ensure that your strings will never “pop-out” during performance and are slightly fanned out on each end. The saddles even accommodate Bass VI model guitars and can be used on left-handed guitars as easily as right-handed. The precisely curved saddles along with the four height adjustment screws allow you to set-up to nearly any common fingerboard radius, from 7.25″ onward. This also eliminates annoying “buzzing” or rattle associated with previous designs. The saddles themselves are made of solid brass and plated with a thick “hard chrome” finish.
Our Tele saddles are the same as above, but with the bridge option of either electroplated brass saddles and swivels (M3 Bridge) or hard chrome-plated brass and stainless steel swivels (M4 Bridge).
Hard chrome plating is commonly used to reduce friction and increase wear resistance in parts like piston rings, hydraulic cylinders and bearing surfaces. Although much more expensive to manufacture than “decorative chrome” found on other bridges, our saddles’ unique hard chrome-plating aids in lubricity while tuning or actuating the vibrato of an Offset or Bigsby equipped guitar, ensuring years of consistent performance and accuracy. No other bridge manufacture uses a plating this durable.
Saddle on the Lathe
All of the screws on our bridges are made from either 18-8 or 316 solid stainless steel. The springs are made from 302 solid stainless steel.
The Offset Mastery Bridge is easy to install. See this video for a demonstration.