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1966 Fender Jazzmaster with Poor Man's Floyd Rose: Here's the short version: I got this guitar in the 6th grade. By sophomore year in college my performing tastes had gone from Springsteen to Eric Clapton and were starting to tend towards Eddie Van Halen. Now you can't pull off Van Halen with a microphonic bridge pickup and even worse, a 22 year old tailpiece vibrato design that wouldn't stay in tune. I was poor but I had machine shop skills (thank you, Iņaki) so I made my own. The full story has all the details but you really need to be a guitar geek (or an Auburnian) to appreciate it.  This is the guitar. Notice the hex wrenches on a string for string changes. Semper Paratus. There's a shorter whammy bar as well. Yes, that's a PAF; don't know the year.  Close up of the bridge and tailpiece. That's a Dunlop Gator Grip my wife bought me right after we met when I was playing in SunRize. My wife's wheelhouse is 80s metal (she knew me better than she thought!) but she came to all the gigs. Even this one. |
 Close up of the actual Tremolo in the tailpiece. The duck mouth things are just steel. Aluminum's too soft. Those are rollers in the bridge, under and over. It has an approximation of a knife edge and you can set the swing tension of the whammy bar. If I knew what I was doing I would have left the tailpiece alone. I was probably afraid to. I thought I would do better breaking it into two separate chunks.  I tried to patent this through MIT. It's a sprung, blocked hard stop so you stay in tune through bends and broken strings but you can still pitch up on the vibrato if you exceed the preload. MIT said no, and a few years later the concept came to market as the Hipshot Tremsetter. I tried one on my Jackson Soloist. This one is better.  In the case. That's the original body color. It's still hard to lug this 30 pound thing around. |
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