Bridge Systems

This section covers the bridge systems used on Harmony guitars during the lost era.

H-801/802/803/804/57-2980/57-2950/Teisco Bridge System

This system consisted of a height-adjustable, non-intonatable, cast pot metal bridge assembly and a cast tailpiece where the ball ends of the string fit into slots cut under the cover. This particular design was used on the Harmony 57-2950/H801, H802, H803, H804, and the 57-2980 Marquis. The 218x Series used a similar system except it was a stamped assembly like older Teisco products, rather than cast like the earlier units were.

The string spacing on these is a little thinner, and is adjustable via 3 notches on the saddles. I'm assuming whoever designed this did this for 3 reasons. Firstly, it allows the string spacing to be made smaller. Secondly, it gives a margin of error to QC at the manufacturing house, so they don't have to get the bridge exactly right, and still have the strings line up with the pickups and go down the neck in a straight path still ,and lastly, because possibly if they needed to make a cheap 12-string guitar, they could use the same bridge and use the outer 2 slots.

A common upgrade I make to this system is to utilize some kind of adjustable bridge the strings can pass over, usually for me I use cheap Tune-O-Matic copies for this job. I have used Memphis style and ABR-1 style and both work great for this. They also stop the strings from jumping around (if you use light strings), and they also make the intonation a lot better.