I also pinned my whammy bar by hammering a piece of wood into the bottom of the bending mechanism, whammies steal tone, and if you don't use em often or at all it's worth pinning em down. A nice chunk of wood will transfer tone to the body of the guitar when it's holding the bridge whammy mechanism down.
I play a Fender Jaguar, and have the stock bridge on it. I can't really use light gauge strings on it because the low break angle from the tailpiece, combined with the lower tension from the strings makes the strings pop out of the saddles with hardly an aggressive strum. However, the low-tension bridge design, along with the short scale neck allows .012's to feel as easy to bend as .010's on, say, a telecaster/les paul. There's something oddly charismatic about being able to do bends easily with flatwound strings.
now I only play acoustic banjo and 12 and 6 strings. I find that on the guitars I like thin strings play really loose. on the 6-string I use the thin string from a pack of twelves apearently not an uncommon practice for folk and old time country musicians. on the banjo I have a wound Electric bass G-string and two banjo strings I play with a bow so I am doing everything wrong [t]here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgu5AW9q8pI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wjOW0wVjGc