Any fellow guitarists here who do mod/repair work?

[Simplicius]

Useful information in Testing? This will never do!

Off to AMP.

[YT300000]

The one I'm wondering about is a Chinese made Affinity. It's the same crappy vintage style that you see on almost all Squiers. I'm about to give it a hard tail, and after I block the trem string block with a piece of wood, is there any reason at that point at all for keeping the springs in the cavity? Anyone ever take all of them out?

Make sure you tighten the height-adjustment screws all the way down, too, to provide an even firmer connection between bridge and body. I'd leave the springs in there, since removing them would only weaken the force. Once your bridge is locked down, you'll notice an improvement in sustain and resonance in the guitar. Oh, and you'll need to reset your intonation, obviously.

As for strings, I prefer 10's myself. I think they have a thicker sound than 9's but are still easier to manipulate than 11's or 12's. On that note, Stevie Ray Vaughan played using 12's as I recall. In fact, much his tone on his first album was his guitar, his amp and those bridge cable strings he played. No effects. No manipulation through electronic widgets. Not even distortion.

Well, SRV famously used a TS-808 to get his overdrive tones, but that's it. From there, the signal just went to a Fender Vibrolux set on the edge of breakup.

It's not really that hard, you just need a bit of patience and 3 or 4 sizes of screwdrivers.

This is coming from a guy who utterly abhors locking nuts (you lose too much tone, even on the Fender swivel variety of the 80's), and is to too cheap to buy locking tuners: with proper balancing, you can dive bomb on any well-made floating bridge all day and come back perfectly in tune every time.

Please impart this forbidden knowledge!

The most important thing is to set your bridge to a slight float, not the standard Strat setting where the bridge likes to sit in its highest position. This lets you pull up a tiny bit after coming out of a dive, which resets pitch creep across all 6 strings. To do this, detune your strings by a tone or two, and tighten your spring claw into the guitar's body until the bridge is ~ 1/8" above the body of the guitar. The screw corresponding to the high strings should be roughly one half to a full turn looser than the bass screw, to balance string height and tension. Tension is usually pretty equal when both E strings are similarly distanced from the fretboard. If you can avoid torsional forces along the neck in this way, you'll gain a lot of stability, since the strings won't be pulling outwards against one another with each movement.

However, sometimes you get a problem where only one or two strings are going out of tune, and not all 6 equally. Make sure your tuning pegs are stable and not wiggling about. Remember to always tune UP; that is if you overshoot the note, don't slack the key down to pitch, but rather slack it excessively and then tighten back up to pitch again. It is possible that you have really cheap tuners causing this problem, but any halfway decent machine head should hold its own.

In that case, it's almost certainly a result of the string binding on the saddle or nut. The nut is the usual culprit, and the easier one to fix: loosen the offending string until it is slack, pull it out of the nut, and evenly apply a thin line of graphite with a pencil. This is especially necessary on cheap plastic nuts, and will probably solve your problem. If you're still binding (which often results in that clicky snapping sound as string windings rub against the bridge), you can try applying the tiniest drop of WD-40 on the saddle, which will allow the string to move naturally. I stress that this drop must be tiny, or it will get everywhere - for that reason, feel free to use low-viscosity motor oils like 10W-30 - I just mentioned WD-40 because everyone (should) own it.

If the single string tuning problem still persists, the solution is a lot more invasive, and requires filing the saddle to an angle where you maintain continuous contact with the string. I don't recommend doing that yourself, it's really a job for a luthier.

And if you're getting creaky sounds just from your trem springs, try rolling up a few cotton balls, and sticking them inside the springs. This is a good first measure if you're not sure where the creaking is coming from, and don't want to mess around with your bridge.

EDIT: I neglected to mention that I wrote the procedure for setting up a floating bridge assuming that it was already floating to begin with, just excessively so. If it's set in contact with the body, you should instead loosen the spring claw, and then bring the strings up to pitch, as they will pull the bridge forward and induce the 1/8" float.

[Superman]

Make sure you tighten the height-adjustment screws all the way down, too, to provide an even firmer connection between bridge and body. I'd leave the springs in there, since removing them would only weaken the force. Once your bridge is locked down, you'll notice an improvement in sustain and resonance in the guitar. Oh, and you'll need to reset your intonation, obviously.

Already done, dude.

[The Spartan]

As for strings, I prefer 10's myself. I think they have a thicker sound than 9's but are still easier to manipulate than 11's or 12's. On that note, Stevie Ray Vaughan played using 12's as I recall. In fact, much his tone on his first album was his guitar, his amp and those bridge cable strings he played. No effects. No manipulation through electronic widgets. Not even distortion.

Well, SRV famously used a TS-808 to get his overdrive tones, but that's it. From there, the signal just went to a Fender Vibrolux set on the edge of breakup.

When he did use distortion, yes. He also had a vintage Fuzzface. I'm talking his clean tone. On that album, I don't recall offhand any of the songs using distortion, and if I remember correctly from reading in Guitar World magazine, it was recorded with his guitar and his amp with no effects whatsoever.