I wouldn't count on being able to get a new bridge that fits. My experience suggests that anything you buy new will be for American guitars with wider necks than the '60s Japanese necks tend to be, and your E strings will end up hanging off the neck.. I don't know about your Kent but I did a bunch of work on a Kent, and I've been looking around a bit, and what I've seen is that the stock bridges don't have string guides so the strings cross at points dictated by the string spacing on the tailpiece. The result was that the strings were way too close together to be playable for me, especially up the neck. I ended up carefully, and only semi-successfully, filing grooves in my bridge to space the strings the way I wanted them. I also shimmed the neck and raised the bridge to get plenty of downward pressure to hold the strings in place.
I'm not sure what to sugges for a bridge for yours. You can look on eBay for older Japanese bridges from Teiscos, etc. Determine the string spacing you're going to need and ask the seller to measure for you. My guess is it's going to be about 50 mm from E to E. I'm working on another thin-necked guitar project now and was able to find a tune-a-matic bridge where the slots in the saddles were not in the center of the saddle, so I could adjust the spacing inward somewhat by rotating the saddles so that the slots were closer to the center of the bridge. I'm trying to figure out what to do for a tailpiece and will probably make my own. I have a friend who made a bridge by finding a way to keep a piece of thick threaded steel rod where the bridge should be. The threads hold the strings where he wants them. Of course there's so way to adjust the intonation of individual strings that way.
If you're interested, look at some of the projects in the Show and Tale section of this board for ideas. There's a description of my Kent project there, and some other cool stuff.
-ScottStatistics: Posted by cheepaxes — Tue Nov 25, 2008 11:58 am
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