Hahaha! Thank you for that - Ceri just did see it and this whole thread is right up his geeky street!

I'm not going to get further into the Fender/Callaham debate, let alone the copper infused thing. That all awaits fresh comment from the sometimes cryptically terse Mike Eldred.

I suspect people are unnessecarily at crossed purposes over the cast / cold rolled thing, which is a false dichotomy. Steel is made when you mix iron and around two percent carbon. You can add other elements too, such as chromium (for stainless steel), nickel, phosphorus, manganese - and of course copper. These all slightly change the performance of the steel and they are all added (infused) to make alloys whilst the metal is molten. After which it is poured (cast). It can be hot rolled as part of that process or cold rolled later, which again give somewhat different properties.

Now my contribution to geekiness. I said that to make steel the other elements are added to iron when it is molten. But there is an exception to that. You can also introduce carbon to iron mechanically by beating it in at low temperatures. This was done in the process of blade making by the Anglo-Saxons in my country 1500 years ago, by Indian smiths even longer ago than that during the Roman era - and by fabulous Japanese craftsmen to this day when they make Samurai swords.

None of these people had the technology to produce temperatures high enough to make hardened steel so what they did instead was to beat together bundles of iron rods, twisting them together as they went, flattening the bundle and then folding it lengthwise and beating and twisting some more. Though in ancient times they surely had no idea of the chemistry, what in fact was happening was that carbon from the forge was getting combined with the iron almost by accident and steel was being produced. This process is called pattern welding, I've seen it done and it is a most amazing thing.

What is interesting about all of this is that it makes the very highest grade steel on the planet, superior to anything a foundry can create with modern methods. This is in great part because of the very unevenness of distribution of carbon through the iron, which yields a metal with particularly high tensile strength and miraculous springiness.

This method of working gives the resultant blades fascinating serpentine patterns on their surface, which were much fabled in ancient Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature and which can be seen to this day on Samurai swords and high price sushi chefs' knives.

And where I'm going with all of this is; if we want the ultimate block for our Strat bridges we need not to be bothering with cold rolled steel, nor brass, nor titanium, nor any of the other voodoo. What we need to do is have our bridges produced by hand by Japanese sword makers using ancient pattern welding techniques. Then we can truly say we have the best of the best!

Of course, it is going to cost. I bought my oldest friend an entry quality pattern welded sushi knife. It is absolutely stunningly beautiful - and it cost £120 / $180. But that's nothing: the same shop was selling top sushi knives for... £36,000 / $54,000.

I kid you not.

So just how much do we care about our guitar tone...?

Long, long post. If you read it all - congratulations!

Cheers - C

EDIT: to add a photo. This is a steel blade produced by pattern welding. C'mon, admit it: you can't quite live at peace till you have a bridge block made from metal that looks like this...

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I put Callaham's in all my strats. There is a huge difference IMO. On my MIM, I replaced EVERYTHIGN except the body and neck (though I re-radiused the fretboard and refret it). Pup's, nut, tuners, wiring, pots, caps; you name it, its been replaced. I tell everyone that if I could go back and only do one mod, it would be the Callaham. Now its especially noticable on a MIM since they use a crap zinc cast block, but you may not notice as much on a higher end one. Something to keep in mind is not only what it's made of, in this case steel, but how it's made. Most blocks are cast, the Callaham are machined out of a solid chunk of steel. they do brighten up the tone, so some may not like that. One thing i noticed is that once i replaced the ping vitage style tuners for sprezel locking, the added mass of the tuners added a bit of sustain, and darkend the tone a little, so it was perfect; tones of sustain, but not 'make your ears bleed' treble.

I knew I could count on my friend Ceri.

nikininja, the only difference that I know is the difference in sound between materials, and the softer metals seem to me, to rob the sound and sustain, while the harder metals allow the vibrations through better. I'm not convinced that the mass has as much to do with the tone, as the hardness does. But Fender gets on these "high mass" kicks sometimes, maybe there is something to it, I don't know for sure.

I'm sure that ME is giving the best answer that he can, and that just possibly some are drawing too many inferences about what he says, I wish that I felt comfortable enough to ask him more specifically. I have read his comments and sometimes he will defer if a question is outside his scope. I have no doubt that the CS uses the best stuff, but production Strats....maybe not so much.

I don't know if my scales are accurate, but I got 241.5 grams (8.6 ounces) for the 08 Am Std block, and 273 grams (9.7 ounces) for the Callaham. My Am Std block might be different than yours.....? Dang it!!! Now were going to have to argue about our scales, doh! Anyone else with some scales out there?

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---> "The amp should be SWITCHED OFF AND UNPLUGGED before you do this!" <---

Por favor, disculpe mi español, no se llega a la práctica con mucha frecuencia.

Hee-hee, thank you!

Took it in a totally different direction, anyhow. I'm waiting to see if Mr Shimmilou with his foundry experience feels like biting on any of that...?

Cheers Hop (and happy New Year to you!) - C

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Something to consider with my AVRI block and the replacement I tried is that the original block has a coat of paint on it. The replacement is raw metal. I'm sure the paint on the Fender block has something to do with it. The unpainted block is brighter sounding. Seems to me. If the replacement had a coat of paint on it, it may sound the same as the original.

I don't know if Fender paints them for sound reasons or to protect them from rust. But it seems to me the paint would have to affect the sound. Would it not? Painted metal won't chime as brightly as unpainted metal will it?

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"Damn Right I Got the Blues"

I think we can safely assume that all kitchen scales are accurate enough for this work.

Ceri that method of sword beating you mention, is that what causes the multiple layers of steel katana's are made up of? As many as 65000 layers in some instances. Imagine having to hammer that lot out, no wonder the Katana was termed the ultimate sword design.
Ya can't beat that Japanese manufacture can ya?

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No no and no

I thought that your post was great Ceri.

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---> "The amp should be SWITCHED OFF AND UNPLUGGED before you do this!" <---

Por favor, disculpe mi español, no se llega a la práctica con mucha frecuencia.

Thank you!


Or ours, for that matter. Perhaps for nobody's amusement but my own, here's some stuff I know about hand forged steel. This is my photo of the sword that came out of the Anglo-Saxon ship burial site at Sutton Hoo in the east of England in 1939. A bit rusty after 1400 years in the ground, however x-rays clearly show the pattern welded structure of the steel:


The Royal Armouries at the Tower of London were commissioned to construct a replica. The metalurgists on this thread will understand what they're seeing here. On the left the raw iron rods bent into various patterns and assembled ready for final beating into a blade. On the right, a section of a finished blade, carbon now incorporated and giving that amazing surface pattern (again, my photo):


This is the finished replica blade (me in the reflection ). Somewhere on the internet is a video of the guy making it, but I can't seem to find it at this second:


And a closeup of the steel. In ancient times they likened these wavy patterns to snakes crawling through the metal, or marks left by the breath of dragons:


That along with the real Katana Samurai swords (not the cheapo imitation things sold to kids in the West) are the best quality steel ever made by human beings.

And that is what the ULTIMATE Strat trem block will have to be made from.

Get shopping, guys!

Cheers - C

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Well I do know someone with a forge, if you fancy chancing your arm. He makes vintage car body panels in the place.

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No no and no

So - have him forge a block of pattern welded steel (I bet he'll know all about that). Then machine it into a trem block.

And then you can come on this Forum and claim to have the absolute ultimate in toneful sustain and nobody will be able to argue!

And if anyone could make that come true, Nicholas Ninja, it is definitely you!

G'night - C

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No it was more you get doing the business with the hammer and the iron, whilst I do a spot of fishing. My next mission is to solve the problem of the Deluxes neckplate. It looks like I'm going to have to use a Standard's trem on the guitar.

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No no and no

Wow . That sword metal stuff is some pretty interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing that Ceri. Now I'm gonna always wonder what my strats would sound like with one of those blocks.

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"Damn Right I Got the Blues"

In reading this, I can imagine your surprise when you found out it already had a steel block in it. If your reason for wanting to buy a new one was due to less sustaining properties . I can say that the attribute of not sustaining well is what I found in my early 80's '57 AVRI, and the same for a couple others from different time periods I've run across.

In another thread, there were comments about the whackiness a thread can turn into. Which I'm suspecting was more about how involved people get with these kinds of things for many pages. But I just can't get into these Block discussions all that much. By all conventional wisdom, my AVRI should be a tone/sustain monster. Tone +1 , Sustain -1 . That's a '57 AVRI for ya. Love it for what it is.

If we're talking about sustain, then what are we to make of guitars that don't use ANY kind of block, and yet sustain very well and have awesome tone?? What does that say about all of this metal infusing, casting, hot/cold rolled steel, copper, more mass, less mass, mess?

Although I do find Niki and Ceri's posts highly entertaining in this topic.



+1,000,000,000
In fact quite the opposite happened to me the other night. I was watching a Cheap Trick live @ Austin City Limits. Rick Nielsen Had some notes dying out on him during a solo. You could clearly see that he didn't care, just kept wailing away.. And all I could say was "How cool is that!!" It had a great raw humanizing feel to it, and I loved every minute of it. The crowd loved it all because he rocked with conviction. Those kinds of things never cross their minds.

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HaleAmano- House Of Sharks (Now On iTunes)
http://www.reverbnation.com/haleamano
http://www.haleamano.com

im sure newton's law fits in somewhere with force=massxacceleration when talking string vibration and mass.
but your right, mass should not be so important rather than density..

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"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present."

oogway, kungfu panda 2008