I wanted to do a few upgrades to a Fender US Made Telecaster loaded body I built with a custom wiring harness and a set of Fender Custom shop pickups.

I first found Van Dyke Harms of all places – Etsy. They have a very successful store on there and offer a lot of their custom guitar products. I really like trying out up and coming products.

I felt their Telecaster Hybrid Bridge would look at home on this Tele.

The bridge and Compensated Saddle Set offer the following features:

• Strings can be routed through the body or toploader style hence the hybrid name
• Twice the thickness of a factory stamped ash-tray bridge
• Bridges are CNC machined from a solid billet of stainless steel
• Hand finished to an attractive satin sheen.
• Fits vintage spec bridge patterns.
• Saddles have semi-blind screw adjustment holes (Set screws will never come through the top.)
• Bottoms of saddles are milled to lower adjustment than a standard 5/16" diameter saddle
• Saddle height adjustment screws, intonation adjustment screws, and springs are stainless steel so they are corrosion-free.
• Price $189.95

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Observations –

• Bridge is well made
• All of the edges are smooth and not rough
• Nice deeply cut wire grooves in the saddles
• I like the satin finish
• They make different version of the bridge to include:
• Half Bridge
• Cuts for G-Bender or Bigsby
• Humbucker pickup version and left hand version for the single coil version
• They even make really fancy looking hammered brass versions of their compensated saddles
• All-in-all you could really build a high end and very pretty telecaster build using their parts.

I also added a custom relic’d neck that I picked up from Mr G’s Custom Shop on eBay. I loved the Stratocaster neck so much that I wanted to try out a Telecaster version.

The bridge assembly is an exact fit for a Fender Telecaster Vintage bridge. This would be the Fender Three Brass Barrels with four mounting holes and string spread of 2 and 1/8” made from 1986 to present. Including I tried and it fits a Squier Classic Vibe ‘50s Telecaster


This thing is built like a friggin’ Tank – I am kind of jokingly referring to it as the Telecaster “Battle” Bridge. You could actually use this thing as a weapon. I could not imagine being able to do anything to this bridge that would cause it any damage.

Also, just for clarification – I was not provided any of the parts I used in this video. I purchase the neck and the bridge with my own money and did not receive any discounts or financial payment for any of my statements. This allows me to tell you if I do not loke some as well without reservation.

Next, I seated the neck and strung the guitar with the low and high e strings.

This would help me align the neck, guitar body, and bridge so I could drill the four neck mounting holes on the back of the guitar.

After I was satisfied that the strings were aligned, I drilled the four holes and installed the neck plate and four screws.

Since I was replacing both the neck and the bridge, I needed to do a full setup. After measuring neck relief, I found it was within specifications. Next, I stretched the strings and did a good baseline tuning while holding the guitar in the playing position.

I measured string height and since the saddles came to me all flat on the bridge, I needed to adjust the saddles, so the strings followed the curvature of the 9 and ½ “ neck radius C profile neck. I found inserting the supplied allen wrench made for positive contact with the slots in the top of the adjustment screws.

After retuning again in the playing position, I checked intonation. I only needed to adjust the screw for the brass saddle for the Low E and A Strings.

Final observations –

I absolutely love the neck. It plays so well and feels so broken in. The look is awesome as well.

The Van Dyke Harms bridge is a high-end precision piece of equipment. I would recommend this bridge to anyone.

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