Four Part Harmony

Well, I’m continuing to make slow progress on the guitar. Actually, it’s mostly a test of my patience at this point. I’ve been really enjoying the french polishing, and the guitar is starting to look pretty nice. I think I’ve nearly got enough “sessions” finished, so I’ll soon be able to polish it up and move on to attaching the bridge. I think I mentioned I’m finishing the neck and headstock with tru-oil, which is a gunstock finish that guitarmakers have adopted as a neck finish (I guess you can even finish an entire guitar with it). I’ve gotten it to the point where there should be enough coats on it, so I need to let it sit for a couple weeks before polishing it up. Once it’s all polished I can go ahead and put the tuning machines on, which I’m pretty excited to do because it’ll really start to be looking finished. For now though…patience.

So I started making the bridge.

Here’s the ebony blank, which I sanded flat prior to laying out the bridge outline, saddle slot, and bridge pin holes. There are some pretty critical measurements involved with laying out the saddle slot. I think I spent several days reading and deliberating before I went ahead and routed the slot. It seems to have come out ok, but as with everything, I won’t really know until I string it up.

(editors note: Nicki says I need to make it clear that the saddle slot is really supposed to be crooked like that. It’s like that to compensate for the fact that the strings vibrate differently due to their differing thicknesses.)

Drilling the bridge pin holes was pretty straightforward, though as you can probably see one of them got a tad off center.

Then I rough cut the bridge outline on the bandsaw. It’s tough to see, but I also countersunk the bridge pin holes. I had purchased a set of countersink drill bits when we were installing our kitchen cabinets way back when. At one point, the bit that was getting the most use snapped clean off just past the countersinking part of the bit. I was pretty bummed at the time, but hung on to the broken bit, and subsequently that busted bit has become more useful than all the rest of them. I was able to use it here, and it worked great.

I started in carving on the bridge, but was having a pretty tough time. Ebony is pretty hard and heavy. Not very easy for chiseling. Still I wanted to remove the bulk of the material from the wings so I didn’t have to sand it all off. Once I had most of the material removed with the chisel, I did most of the rest of the fine shaping on the little belt sander.

Here it is after some fine sanding and polishing.

I also set to work carving up the bone, which seemed like it was going to be tough, but really wasn’t all that bad. I got a thin piece cut out to the appropriate rough dimensions, then fine tuned the shape until it fit snugly into the slot.

Here’s the bridge and rough saddle. The saddle height is still oversized, and the final shaping will be done when I’m doing the final set up. Which, if all goes well, could be within the next few weeks or so…