This customer’s (Tom) Hondo Pro II bass was interesting for a couple of reasons; the replacement parts it required were unusual and somewhat tricky to find, and the instrument itself had a mysterious history. (I’ll cover the bass guitar’s origin in a future post)

Tom needed some kind of solution for the Hondo’s bridge. The Pro II uses a Gibson-style, 3-Point bridge, famously used on Gibson’s EB basses. The saddles are very much like those on a guitar TOM or wraparound bridge but much larger. It was missing 3 of the 4 saddles but everything else was in good working condition needing just a bit of a clean. Considering that the Hondo Pro II fetches around £150-£200 mint, it made sense therefore to source a set of replacement saddles rather than an expensive bridge assembly.

Now, although they are not partly common, these tune-o-matic bridges are not restricted to a handful of makes or models. There are plenty of complete 3-Point replacement bridges on the market and so I assumed that individual parts would be fairly easy to find.

In fact, parts for these 3-point bridges are few and far between. The most suitable saddle sets I could find were from Allparts: BB-2075-001 Saddle Sets for Gibson Basses. At the time, this part was unavailable on both the UK and US sites. I assume then that it has now been discontinued.

Fortunately, the guys at Allparts UK were able to put together a set of 4 from loose singles.