Luthiery Laboratories

Well, I ordered up one of these headless bridges for about $60 shipped, and after three weeks, here it is:

As you can see, I disassembled one of the gear mechanisms. The one-piece gear and spool appear to be solid brass, held in the bracket with a c-clip. The gears actually work surprisingly well, smooth, with just a little slop that would disappear under string tension. Everything is also lubricated, which I did not expect from China. I am surprised, the quality of materials and design of this unit is much better than I expected. You can see how the knobs pull out on the shafts for easier adjustment.

So I let my inner nine-year-old have its way, and disassembled it completely. Then I took a magnet to it. To my further surprise, the worm gears are magnetic, as are the knobs !!! ( Also, the steel plate that retains the knobs, and all the fasteners. ) As you can see inside the saddle assemblies, the lower part may also be brass, although the upper part scratches silvery, so zinc or aluminum. The body of the unit is zinc alloy, or 'pot metal', it is much too heavy to be aluminum. Still, that's a lot more brass and steel than I was expecting, and in all the necessary places. The black finish is some kind of very hard epoxy paint I guess, nice, and very difficult to scratch. Anodize would be better, but at this price ...

One problem I see is that the aft mounting screws are very close to the cutout that will be needed. You can see that in the second picture. The supplied mounting screws reach about 3/4" past the cutout, so it is probably not a problem, but could be better designed. Also, intonation adjustment is about 3/8", so you need to be precise in mounting this. No worse than a Ric.

And now the bad part. You can see the ding in the top of the body, that perfectly matches the damaged height screw. Two dings, actually. It looks like the height screw was hammered into the body - it was probably dropped on the floor and the saddle bent way back, further than I can make it go without breaking it. Probably broke the saddle, which was swapped-out for a straight one. The lighter mark is a bounce. There are other less obvious marks on the bottom and corners. The seller offered me a ten dollar discount. Ha !!! I would not use this one even if it was free, it is going back. But I would certainly be interested in using one of these, if I can get a good one.

Now I'll have to see what the seller does, but one good thing about buying on eBay is that eBay always sides with the buyer in any kind of dispute. So even buying from sketchy sellers on the other side of the world is pretty safe, although sometimes frustrating, like this. If you are going to buy something from China, buy it on eBay.

This also points out a huge problem with Chinese products - there is absolutely no quality control. This damage happened in the factory, there is no way it could have happened in transit. Rather than get docked for the part he ruined, the worker packed it up, figuring that shipping it to the other side of the planet would be enough to hide the evidence. Since there's no way to trace this unit back to the worker who ruined it, he got away with it. An inspector would have caught this, but there are no inspectors, or worse yet, maybe there are, and they passed this.

Quality is a concept that is completely alien to Chinese manufacturers. They just don't care. You would never see something like this from Japan or South Korea. Just wait until we start importing cars from China ( actually, we already are - Volvos, and now Teslas. ) People are going to die.

I have nothing against the Chinese. This is not a racial slur. Chinese quality control is well-known to be non-existent. To be fair, see the beautiful and inexpensive Chinese Ric-knock-off "R" tailpiece that I recently put on my 325 guitar build. I am quite pleased with that.

Oops, I almost forgot. The other end - the "headless", looks perfectly fine. From the weight, I'd say it is also zinc, finished the same as the bridge, with jazz bass string spacing. It will require either a nut or a zero-fret. The whole system uses regular single-ended strings. My inner engineer had no problem putting it all back together.

Coda

After a bit of weasling by the seller and my threat to simply take the matter to eBay, they agreed to a full refund, and dropped their demand that I ship the damaged part back to them at my own cost. After several days of waiting for the promised refund, I made good on my threat and filed a claim with eBay. The seller immediately posted the full refund to PayPal. EBay/PayPal is the ONLY way to deal with overseas sellers.

On the other hand, eBay has become a very bad place for sellers. It is far too easy for unscrupulous buyers to bully sellers. I know people who have stopped selling on eBay entirely for this reason.

So now I am left with the damaged part, which the seller has so far not requested back. Closer inspection reveals that almost every corner and edge has a scuff or scrape in the finish. This thing has been kicked around - I think it is B-stock - rejected by QC ( assuming there is any QC ! ) Sometimes you don't want to go with the lowest-priced seller. I've been experimenting with filling the dings in the top with black CA. I would still not use it for a real project, but I could use it for a mock-up. The head piece is fine, and would be useful for another body-tuner project like my Kubickish bass.

I like to build cheap instruments, but that doesn't mean they are not good instruments. Building an instrument is a great deal of time and labor, and finishing it with damaged parts makes no sense.