Hi,

I have some rust on the saddles of my 94 japanese strat.
Should I bother getting the rust off, or replace them all together?
The saddles don't have a "fender" stamp on them, although they are of the vintage type.

Thanks

I doubt if it would affect the tone at all but the strings could hang up on rusty spots when you bend or tune the strings.I'd just get rid of the rust for now and only change the saddles if rust became a recurring. BTW a light coating of oil or WD 40 will help inhibit rust forming.

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'65 Strat,65 Mustang,65 Jaguar,4 more Strats,3 vintage Vox guitars,5 Vox amps,'69 Bassman with a '68 2-15 Bassman cab,36 guitars total-15asst'd amps total,2 vintage '60s Hammond organs & a myriad of effects-with a few rare vintage ones.

The thing is that rust affects metals . That said it affects everything so if you can try to clean the rust. Rust can get to the strings and pickups and of course in time will affect your sound.

Worst case is the corrision of the saddles may cause premature string breakage by corroding the strings or cutting into them. A little oil helps prevent this while maintaining the vintage worn look..

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"Epitaph on a blues musician’s tombstone: “I didn’t wake up this morning”" Davy Knowles


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OK, thanks.

What kind of oil should I use? I guess the lemon oil is out of the question?

After you've got rid of the rust, I'd look to a very light coating of gun oil or something similar.

I do think that is a very temporary measure though. Your hand is going to take a lot of the oil off the saddles.

Personaly I'd just clean and polish the saddles. When they get to a point that they become unusable replace em. Or replace em now and keep the original saddles in a plastic container with a gun oil covering over em.

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No no and no

Rust Never Sleeps.

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You dig?

Any corrsion of any kind is always a bad thing for a lot of obvious reasons. Additionally if the mass of the bridge is slowly being reduced eventually it has to have an affect on resonance and sustain.

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Just think of how awesome a guitar player you could have been by now if you had only spent the last 10 years practicing instead of obsessing over pickups and roasted maple necks.

I bought a strat plus recently, I new it was beat up from the pics I saw online. Once I got it I noticed the intonation springs and screws were rusted pretty badly, so are most of the pick guard screws too. I threw on a fresh set of strings, just to hear the thing before I did anything to it, played for awhile, loved it!, wiped her down, put some oil on rusty parts and saddles. About a week later, I had it sitting on the couch when the high e string popped off just from looking at it!. I picked it up and the b string popped off too .
The rust on the saddles ate through 3 strings in just about 6 days.

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People say I'm a nice guy, I can't figure why