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A picture's worth a thousand words.  The customer complained of very poor string-to-string response from a Fishman UST installed in his Taylor. 

Turns-out he'd tried to remedy the issue by running a few drops of CA along the saddle to "make the contact better".   It didn't seem to work quite as expected.

Fast-forward to this morning, and the only way of removing the saddle was to drill it out in sections, which (of course) made toast out of the UST.   Probably could've used a saddle-slotting jig, but it didn't seem worth setting it up, knowing what the eventual outcome would be anyway.

He wasn't terribly thrilled with the Fishman in the first place, so now he gets to choose which model/brand of UST & preamp he'd like installed.  Sigh.

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Seems like you'll have to re-rout anyway to clean up that mess.

You should charge accordingly.

Oddly enough, after all was said and done "in there", the saddle slot was relatively clean, so just some scraping of the walls with a miniature chisel cleaned it up.  Then few passes of a saddle-bottom file to clean the bottom and it was good to go.

yeesh!

i might have tried soaking the saddle in superglue remover in hopes that enough got down there to soften up the CA

Yeah... that was the first method of attack, but the "superglue remover" let me down!   I soaked the saddle pretty good and let it set for about 10mins but it wouldn't budge. 

The bottle of the stuff I have here must be at least 5yrs years old now...  do you know if it has a shelf-life or not?  Might give it another shot on a test piece to see if it's still viable or needs replacing.

Saddle bottom file?  I have never heard of such a thing - but as soon as you say it I feel like I need one........

Yep, and...as usual..."StewMac's got 'em".  Handy little buggers for that last touch in getting a piezo element to lay dead-flat. 

https://www.stewmac.com/Luthier_Tools/Types_of_Tools/Files/Saddle_S...

Don'tcha just love it when people get all DIY with their instruments?

i always say i'd rather fix a guitar that had been dragged on a rope behind a truck than one that somebody tried to fix themselves

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