I recently bought an early 90s Series 2 5-string. It has the old style bridge (similar to a two-piece Steinberger bridge). The factory string spacing is 15mm, which I find a bit tight. My favorite spacing is 16.5mm, which I got used to from my Steinberger basses. The neck on the bass is wide enough to allow for 16.5mm, so what can be done?

Well, I figured I could use modified saddles to gradually spread the strings apart from the center of the bridge out. I contacted Rob and he no longer has any old style saddles that I could buy and tweak. Not wanting to irreversibly and quite visibly alter the original saddles, I had the idea of flipping them upside down and doing the mods on what used to be the bottom side. This way, if it doesn't work out or if I don't like 16.5mm after all, I can always flip them around and it's back to stock.

In a nutshell, I drilled 1/8" holes off-center into the bottom of the saddles (more off-center for the B and G strings, less for the E and D, and dead center for the A). The holes do not go through the saddles. They stop just short of going through, so they're not visible from the top, should I ever turn the saddles back to normal.

I then threaded the holes to 4mm and inserted and tightened 4mm bolts. Then I cut off the bolt heads about 3.5mm from the surface of the saddles and cut string grooves into the protruding part.

Voila! 16.5 mm spacing, reversible to stock if need be. I'm posting this just in case someone else wants to attempt this.