PREFACE: This blogpost comes to you a day late – for no fault of mine. Saturday night, as I was giving finishing touches to the post, this website stopped responding. In response to my SOS, the website hosting this site, got back to me on Sunday afternoon, worked through the day to find the fault and rectify it. The good news is that your favourite guitar site is up and running again.
Last week I left you at the point where I measured the length of the slot in the bridge to select a proper saddle.
After I selected an excellent bone saddle, I got thinking. Does it make sense – financial and otherwise – to put in a bone saddle in an instrument that will be played only sometimes and has more sentimental value than practical value?
At the last moment, I decided to install a plastic saddle that may not be the best but was functional. Going by the neck angle I knew that even this saddle would need to be shaved down.
Now, I own a small belt sander with variable speed, but even at its lowest speed, it tends to melt the plastic rather than sand it. So, it was the old fashioned way that I went: sanding by hand.
The work that remained was purely cosmetic, namely, covering the footprint of the old bridge immediately surrounding the new bridge. After taping off the margin, I hand-painted the area.
Now, the bridgepin holes needed to be drilled to be ready to receive strings. However, care needed to be taken that the pressure from the drill didn’t dislodge the freshly glued bridgeplate. So, I clamped up the bridgeplate with these clamps
Before I strung up the guitar, there was one last job to be taken care of: shaping the bridgepins so that the ball ends of the string did not catch onto them
The strings that the owner had chosen were these
The action, as I saw it, was not ideal but the neck angle being what it was dictated it. It was certainly not unplayable, but most certainly difficult on the upper frets.
As always, I leave you with a photo of the finished job
good to see that