aarongreen -> RE: Question to the luthiers about saddle (May 31 2013 1:59:15)
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My point Stephen was exactly that even within a very tightly controlled and specific design, the wood, the individual piece of wood, has an enormous impact on the mechanical properties of the bridge. My own bridge shaping jig is a swing arm on a router table, it gets my wings to within .2mm of what I consider to be my "all else being equal even though it never is" ideal thickness. There is still a lot of work to do but the closer you get to the finished product, the more you can tell about how it's going to behave. Therefore having a number of bridges to pick from is really a better way to go. The weight and stiffness have to work with how the top works, sometimes you want stiffer, lighter, heavier, more flexible.....on down the line. I can not for the life of me always tell if a bridge blank is going to make the most appropriate bridge (by my standards and expectations) for whatever guitar I am making. I have tons of old Brazilian bridge blanks and lumber well suited for bridges, Brazilian, Indian, Madagascar, Honduran etc. and I'd love to utilize all of it, even if it's to pass the majority of it up until the right guitar comes around. The closer it is to being ready to be prepped for finish, the more I can tell about it and whether or not it is ideal for x guitar. One thing you find, or I have found, in having 50 bridge blanks with the arms carved is how much more picky I have become when picking out the bridges for each guitar. If my CNC guy could get even closer to final (and they never get you all the way) then I can have even more bridges to pick from and that excites me. I spend a whole lot of time on the aesthetics of my work and how the overall guitar is a handmade expression of who I am and what I believe in as a builder....but this is one area where I can see real benefit in some production engineering. I just am not interested in a bridge of the dimensions Tom is creating nor do I think LMI has access to better bridge stock than I do. Quite sure about that actually.
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