I may be buying a new guitar soon that happens to have a vintage-style(think Fender strat) tremolo. I assume it won't be able to hold a tuning well for crap. Is it possible to block vintage style trems the same way people block licensed Floyd Roses? When you block a trem bridge(of any kind), can you still tune the guitar and restring normally? Also, blocking trems do make them stay in tune significantly longer, right? Does blocking have any effect on sustain?

Btw, this has probably been asked tons of times but how much would a professional installation of a trem and locking nut cost, excluding the prices of the parts?

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k... vintage (at least strat) type whammy bars arent even tremolos... they're vibrato or legato or something. You cannot do a good dive with them AT ALL, you can just change the pitch by about a tone... give or take a few cents. They do hold tuning decently in my experience, but i seriously reccommend just getting a floyd or sometihng.

oh and you dont even have to block them... if you lock them down, they will stay level, they arent fully floating, so they wont do that sink in thing.

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My washburn has a 'strat style' whammy bar on it and it stays in tune way longer than my other guitar with a fixed bridge on it.

They're tremolos all right, they've got the springs and all, but yeah like he said, it's not a full floating, so it won't go out of tune so easily. If you watch like Randy Rhoads, you can see him wanking on it on songs like "Over the Mountain", "Mr. Crowley", and so on. Oh, and I forgot, Yngwie uses it alot for like a vibrato effect too.