Broken Whammy Bar Inside Bridge of My Stratocaster

Arghhh…any of you ever have this happen? I broke the whammy bar off and the threaded portion stayed deep inside the bridge on my Fender Strat – after spending close to 2-hours trying various methods to get it out, I finally broke down and bought a new bridge, whammy bar combination for just over $100 CDN.

Truth is I lived with it for almost 2-months, but not having my whammy bar was driving me a little nuts.

So finally today I replaced the entire bridge, restrung and re-tuned the Strat and she is back to normal.

Seriously though – there has to be a way of getting the threaded portion out.

I tried a screw extractor tool for a local hardware store where you drill a pilot whole into the piece that is stuck, then place the heavy-threaded extractor into the pilot hole and theoretically it was supposed to remove the stuck piece.

No such luck, all it did was further mess up the whole to the point it was unrepairable.

Oh well, there seems to be a fair number of others that have done the same thing, so at least I’m not alone!