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This bridge is a direct replacement on Gibson guitars with an ABR-1 bridge.
The body of this bridge is CNC machined from a billet of Cold Rolled alloy steel under rigid quality control standards at every level of production. This is the only alloy Steel bridge available. Gibson and the other aftermarket bridges are cast from a zinc alloy, brass or aluminum which causes heavy dampening to the critical overtones that support the fundamental.
The body is nickel plated to mil spec standards to maintain all critical dimensions. The intonation screws, mounting studs, and thumbwheels are stainless steel. It is the quality control in production and plating that allows the intonation screws to be a press fit into the body. The saddles are machined from the same brass bar stock we make our Tele saddles before being nickel plated. They are direct replacement on our ABR-1 and Gibson ABR-1 bridges.
What you will hear with the change to steel is a low end that is tight but full. The fuzz should be gone, the tone will be balanced correctly when moving from wound to plain strings. The plain strings will be full without the harsh high end spike. Sustain is improved substantially making vibrato childs play. Many of you have also been victim to the collapsing of the stock bridge from string pressure. You will not collapse our steel bridge. The rigidity of the steel will allow the use of heavy string gauges and again maintaining the strings energy far better than zinc, aluminum, or brass.
The ABR-1 bridges have none of the handworking and tapering of the ends of the bridges from the mid/late 50's. We specifically machined the ends to a taper and through the course of hand polishing recreate the look of the late 50's bridge bodies. The stainless steel thumbwheels are thinner like the 50's model compared to today's production.
Gibson has manufactured some of the most beautiful guitars in history but their tone, especially of the models made in the last 40 years, drives us crazy. The bass response is too muddy and on the majority of instruments is fuzzy like a mini fuzz face is on. The high end is harsh and brittle so moving from wound strings to plain strings is very unbalanced. The sustain is really quite poor. This problem is masked by the use of strong P-90 or humbucking pickups. If Fender style single coils were used, the lack of sustain would become very apparent.
"Tone" is all about overtones or the harmonic series that follows and rides with the fundamental. The choice of bridge material is critical for the simple reason that every note played is influenced by the bridge. In the early days of solid body electric guitars especially at Gibson the only part that really mattered to designs were the pickups. The ABR-1 bridge introduced in 1954 was cast from zinc because it was cheap to produce and nobody thought it made one bit of difference.
Aftermarket bridges have copied the use of zinc without any thought of how can this be improved. In the 70's when CBS took over Fender they threw out Leo's steel strat bridge and changed to the one piece cast zinc (Mazac) bridge to cut cost. The result was the worst sounding strats produced by Fender. Zinc simple should not be used as a bridge material. Brass has been used because it has "more mass", aluminum because it has "less mass". "Mass" is not the property of the bridge material that matters. But it is easy to measure for those who do not understand vibrations.
No material maintains the energy delivered to the string while maintaining a full musical frequency response better than steel. Our ABR-1 is the most significant improvement you can make to a Gibson styled instrument. Just like with our Strat and Tele parts, we are not interested in repeating mistakes of the past, only real audible improvement for all players at any level.
