Need help finding a saddle vintage Kingston Bass

[TheBigCat]

Trying to find a saddle for this vintage Kingston Short Scale Bass. Anyone can help guide me? I'm struggling to find one. Here is a picture of what I found online and what I have. Thank you in advance for your help.

 

[TomB]

@JIO ?

 

[sissy kathy]

Whadaya think. Scroll down for dimensions. It's from Allparts, discounted, and minus the exorbitant shipping charges.

NEW - Tunematic Bass Bridge With Hardware - CHROME | eBay

Other alphabets (Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, etc.) will not be translated and your item will be delayed.

www.ebay.com

 

[JIO]

Trying to find a saddle for this vintage Kingston Short Scale Bass. Anyone can help guide me? I'm struggling to find one. Here is a picture of what I found online and what I have. Thank you in advance for your help.

View attachment 7056654View attachment 7056655

I deal with this issue a lot. Here's what you need to know. 1) you may never find that exact bridge. It's a mystery why '60 vintage bridges go missing, but one explaination is the top part just rests on the bottom part and w/no strings it can detach easily - and subsequently disappear. 2) on eBay and occasionally Reverb - you can find '60s similar vintage MIJ (and Italian, Holland etc) bridges. Prices will vary and sometime the seller wants to retire on selling vintage parts. (aka - stupid high prices) You gotta realize these are not vintage Fenders, Gibsons or Guilds - if you get the bass for nothing and you really want to restore it - maybe the high price will be worth it. 3) and most importantly - these are 30" short-scale basses with narrow fb width/string-spacing. So any vintage bridge that may work on it needs to align with the string-spacing at the saddle - which is usually going to be 2" from E-G. There are new aftermarket "floating bridges" (wood base and top with two metal adjusting wheels) that could work - but as they are primarily used on curved hollow-body's so the base will need to be sanded flat for a flat-top solid body. Also, using such a bridge you will need to position it at an angle (lower at the E) to get close to accurate intonation. Doing this will most likely not align with the two post-holes so you'll need to address that by adding a thin plate to cover them and be wide enough to be a suitable base for the bridge.

Another thing to know is that brands of the same bass/parts will vary. Kingston is one of many brands that could incorporate the same bridge.

The takeaway is if you want to restore old obscure basses that are missing parts - you need to be resourceful.

This is a 60s vintage Italian Crucianelli bridge I luckily found on Reverb. Not cheap - but worth it to restore this late '60 WEM Watkins ss bass. It wasn't like the original (which will never surface) but works aesthetically and functionally.

This '63 Burn of London Vista Sonic med-scale was missing a roller saddle and bolts. I fabricated a saddle of brass and used brass bolts where needed. A bridge like this or original saddles will never come up for sale. Note : Burns pre-dated the Schaller 3D roller-saddle bridge by decades.

On this one, I lucked out with the help of a friend in Poland to locate an original (rare) tail-piece/string-stop for a '62 Meazzi Hollywood Jupiter medium -scale bass from Italy.

I did a medium-scale bass in homage of the bass it was installed on and I designed it with a wider fb so was able to use a new 2-post bridge.

'62 Meazzi Hollywood Jupiter

 

[JIO]

Whadaya think. Scroll down for dimensions. It's from Allparts, discounted, and minus the exorbitant shipping charges.

NEW - Tunematic Bass Bridge With Hardware - CHROME | eBay

Other alphabets (Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, etc.) will not be translated and your item will be delayed.

www.ebay.com

Won't work - 2-1/4" string spacing. If one fabricated their own non-slotted saddles - it would be a sufficient platform but it's unlikely the post holes would align. So one would need to fill the existing post holes - re-align and drill new post-holes. One way it can be done.