Repairing

Acknowledging that Warmoth can't cater to every minor variation in matching their products to others, I think in the instance of the bridge mounting holes they have made a mistake.

The Hipshot bridge I selected was on the list of standard patterns for which Warmoth will prepare the mounting, but when I did a trial fitting I found that the middle mounting screw hole was too large, the same size as the string holes.

There were a couple of different paths to a solution to this problem. The most obvious would be to just use a larger screw. That was too easy, and there was a risk of not matching the screw heads in design, size and colour to the bridge.


The most satisfactory fix, in my mind, was to install a wooden sleeve that would restore the hole to the correct size. The required sleeve measured 4.5 x 3 x 16mm. That is a wall thickness of 0.75mm! In wood! Not something that is readily available at the local hardware store or wood merchant.  I certainly don't have the equipment, or skill required to create something like this. Fortunately, my cousin Eric does! When I put my problem to him, he took up the challenge. Using a 25 mm round section I provided, he drilled the hole and turned it down to a fraction larger than the hole in the body. This provided a lovely snug fit.

 This is the result, glued in place and dressed back to the body surface. The hole is not perfectly centred, due to the difficulty of getting a small diameter twist drill to start truly into the end-grain, but the screw will definitely be able to get a bite into the wood all the way down the hole, not just at the very bottom, as before.