ASAT Classic - anyone tried a Mastery Bridge?

[therecluse]

I recently acquired a 1994 ASAT Classic. Loving it so far, but I was curious if anyone has swapped out their box bridge with a Mastery Tele bridge? I have one on another guitar that I could swap on, but I'm not sure it's worth the hassle. Other possible changes would be graph tech string saver saddles (I do this on all my non-saddle lock bridge guitars) and swapping the vintage tuners out with Sperzels (I also have a set of these lying around).

[Danley]

Not a Mastery fan; but I'm not really familiar with their Telecaster bridges as much. To me, they're a bit of "snake oil" as far as people thinking they need to install them to get over what are actually just regular setup errors.

IMO if your guitar doesn't have any string break or tuning issues to begin with I'd avoid thinking about the Mastery swap, and wouldn't think there's any value of swapping tuners either. Even if it does have issues, I'd check things like the nut slots, and individual saddles/tuner posts for problems before blaming the stock parts in general. I also dislike the fact that there are only two adjustable saddles on the Mastery, and no independent height/intonation other than that. Def. doesn't work with all string gauges (a wound G would require compromise)

[therecluse]

I have the mastery on another tele right now, I like it better than the three barrel tele bridge but was just curious if anyone had done apples to apples on a classic.

I put locking tuners on all of my guitars because it makes string changes WAY less of a hassle and I've never noticed any degradation to the sound.

[neutralomen]

I put a mastery on my Jag. There were two main reasons:

-the screw-in arm for the American professional begins to unthread as you wiggle it, and within a year I was already getting rattle from the arm no longer being flush with the threads.

-Stainless steel is essential with a vibrato system that has metal-on-metal friction, and has a plate with a cavity underneath. Water vapor from the air gets inside that tailpiece and causes rust and corrosion. I'm really bummed that Fender doesn't default to stainless for this reason.

The mastery system seems to have solved both those problems.

[Danley]

Their vibrato offers genuine improvement, but I'm a skeptic about their bridges.