Official Luthiers Forum!

Great stuff, everyone! Thanks for sharing!

For me, this is one of those, "don't f### this up!" moments. The first guitar I built was a Les Paul copy. Locating the bridge and posts, for those who don't have access to perfect templates or cnc, either involved some copious measurements, offsets, head scratching, etc. Or you could put your tail piece in place, set your bridge on a shim, and then string up the 1st and 6th strings. Move the bridge around, mark the location of the post holes, and you were in business. Especially since the saddles are adjustable. We take such great pains to get perfect intonation on electrics for any given guitar by moving the saddles around. But on acoustics, we are generally OK with approximate intonation by using a compensated saddle that sort of splits the difference between intonation between strings. This has always puzzled me. It seems that every guitar has a little bit different sweet spot for intonation. So why do people simply measure using a good ruler, template, StewMac Jig, etc.

I make my bridges and cut the saddle slot ahead of time. I then use my nifty clamp on trapeze tail piece to string up the 1 and 6 strings, and then move the saddle around until I get the intonation correct for those two strings. Granted, the bridge might not be perfectly square to the centerline of the body, but it's pretty hard to tell unless you take a square and get up close. Clamp the bridge in place, then do whatever method you use to remove the lacquer and glue it in place.





I've never seen anyone else do this with an acoustic. But it works for me, does not require any measuring (I do measure once it is in place as a triple check), works on any scale length and any instrument. I've been tempted to do the SM jig, or build one of my own. But seem to keep doing it this way.

-Tony

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Tony Thatcher
Bozeman, Montana

That looks great even if you were just to use it as a sanity check after masking for theoretical saddle distance.
I was all set to use it till I saw the "patent pending".

Oh well, I have to respect IP.

Mike
j/k

I'll sell one to you for a million dollars. Gotta make money on guitars somehow!

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

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Tony Thatcher
Bozeman, Montana

Tony--

I've done a few that way. I agree, it works great; no intonation problems. However, I am going to experiment with gluing on an unslotted bridge, then routing the slot afterward. We'll see which way I like better.