Hello All,

Well...I got ambitious and finished up my trem block for my Squier Strat... I picked up a cobalt drill bit and thought I would try that first. It would not cut into the broken high speed steel bit and ended up getting dull pretty fast. I then heated the area including the broken bit with my cutting torch to a cherry red state hoping it would take out the temper in the broken bit but it did not. I tried drilling again with no luck. I let the block cool slowly to not create any stress in the steel block. I thought well it is time to get drastic
and decided to cut a thin slot in from the side deep enough to reach the broken bit and get it out. Once I got in far enough, I then welded the slot up, heated the block again to release any stress the welding might have caused and redrilled the hole and ground the weld on the ouside flush.
I hope to disassemble the guitar again to change strings and do a few other things and install the block and see what it sounds like. This block is a bit thicker and heavier, (I planned it this way) and I hope it has enough room to move.

Here are some images.



The one hole next to the weld has a little weld in the opening but the string end goes through okay. I may end up filing this to make it look better but it does function okay, the problem is my small round file is wore out

I painted this with Krylon Camo spray rattle can and it is the tan color, ( I have tested black but it was not as good as the tan color, don't know why...). I have found this to be an very good primer for bare metal. I may finish up with black but it does not get seen anyway so I may leave it as is.

I hope this helps some. Sometimes things need drastic measures to get fixed. At lease now I have a steel block to try out in my Chicom Strat.

M29