I'm in the repair business and we see all of the implementations of pinless bridges from George Lowden to the plethora of small builders who come and go.
If you are new to guitar building I would strongly suggest that you build at least a few conventionally designed and constructed guitars so that you have ample support available to learn and fully understand the concepts that are present AND super important in bridge design.
When I was a new builder I became obsessed with a new bridge design and as much as I liked what I came up with it's also a monument to some mistakes that I made because I did not understand the following well enough to properly employ them in my design:
1) Break angles which is at times, not always something that pinless designs suffer from, insufficient break angle that a blue grass player and heavy hitter can drive the vibrating wave of a hard hit string right over and past the crown of the saddle.....
2). Serviceability - does the pinless design impede serviceability as Dennis rightly suggested above. Most pinless designs I can still remove the saddle(s) just by loosening the strings and that is important.
3). Pinless designs are not necessarily any more prone to lifting than a conventional design but that glue joint and how it's glued needs to be top notch and very well done. This is really true of any bridge design.
4). If the perimeter design is complex such as a g*bson mustache bridge your clients will hate you come bridge reglue time. A Luthier will have to work around that complex perimeter to clear additional finish or repair same from the thing lifting. It's just way easier to keep the perimeter foot print simple.
So look half the people who come here are interested in a better mousetrap and often fascinated with employing something new and I have seen it time and time and time again here and I engaged in this myself as well. But truth be told the conventionally built acoustic guitar such as a Martin or Collings are pretty hard to beat when it comes to how they perform, the value offered and the down time over time from the engineering and design.
And lastly George Lowden kind of painted himself in a bit of a corner with no offense intended with the split saddle design. He's not the only one either. That severely limited the availability of after market pick-ups that can be installed in one of his guitars. We put a Lyric in a Lowden recently and that is a recommended pup for Lowden instruments and both the owner and us thought it sounded terrible.... Not being critical of George he is a fantastic and accomplished Luthier and I love his stuff and would love to own one myself. I am simply trying to introduce you to the concept of serviceability and the fact that someday it may not be you who has your hands in the sound hole of a guitar you created. How to service it, parts availability, etc should not let any future clients of your's down. I'll add I never expected to sell a single guitar and said so many times here but that's not how it worked out....
Welcome to the forum and if I can ever help feel free to contact me, I co-own Ann Arbor Guitars and my business partner and I have built over 250 guitars between the two of us and we do well over 1,000 guitar repairs annually. So we live this stuff 24/7. It's 6:30 AM and I'm still thinking about Lutherie....
