After considerable thought, I pronounced the old bridge unsalvageable. It just made more sense for the long haul to make a new one. So I planed up some 1/8" x 5/16" x 29" hard maple strips, and went about the matter of trying to bend them.

I tried s-l-o-w, patient bending with dry heat, using a fully regulation fiddle rib bending iron, and even sandwiching the strip between that and a hot flat-iron. 20-30 minutes later, I'd gained about 5 degrees of curvature, and a few minutes after that, that sickeningly as-irreversible-as-pulling- the-trigger sound..."plik". #$^&*(%@!!! Yes, I broke it. It became evident that bending 1/8" thick hard maple required different tactics from the dry heat method used to bend c. 1/32" thick fiddle ribs. So...off to the web to learn the finer points of bending wood. Following two or three sets of directions which consistently outlined the general direction I needed to head, here's my new steam box!

Yes, that's a 5-gallon galvanized gas can, a Coleman camp stove, some radiator hose, some PVC, and some dowels that form a rack for the wood to sit on. I think you can imagine how it works...it just makes lots of steam. The one detail that's not so obvious in the picture is the 1/2" dia. vent hole (red arrow) where the steam (faintly visible) comes out. The strips were inside it when this shot was taken.