Made my First Bone Saddle

[Brent Hutto]

I ought to be embarrassed posting such a baby-steps kind of thing but for the first time this morning I fitted a saddle that a I made myself to one of my guitars. Ta-da!!! It's ugly (although I got the top edge smooth and gloriously shiny) and still needs to be lowered about 0.020"-0.030" to get the action down to where I want it but it fits tight, it works right with no funny noises and it's all mine.

The stock saddle that came out of this guitar had all sorts of fancy compensation angles built into it but with the strings and the action of my setup the intonation was really not "all that" according to my old Peterson. After some watchin', cipherin' and head-scratchin' on it I convinced myself that mostly what it needed was for the string contact point to be as far back as possible rather than some up, some back, some in between which wasn't working out right. Sure enough that seems to be dead-on comparing open strings to fretted 12th strings with the 1st, 4th, 5th and almost on the 6th. The 2nd string and 3rd string have their usual couple cents error fretted at the 12th fret but otherwise pretty good. Of course that may all change when I drop the action down 1/64" or so tonight but that will actually help keep the 6th string from going slightly sharp when fretted up the neck.

I found that the "secret" tools are the little sandpaper drum on a Dremel, starting at high speed to cut the basic shape then on low speed to contour, and the cloth mini-buffing-wheel (dry, clean) to put the final gloss on the top edge. In between of course copious fine-tuning with 220-grit sandpaper. Except for the stench of burning bone it was a fun little job, took me about 45 minutes to get this far with it.

[John Cadd]

Well Brent I think you`re very brave going near a bridge with machinery of any kind.I came from the violin end of the spectrum and a thin round file was favourite for anything near the tuning bits.You seem very keen to have a straight bridge which is puzzling.I would go for accurate fingered octaves first. We are lucky these days with diamond nail files which are perfect for the bridge fitting .Rub the bone on the file for a nice straight shaping. I made the mistake of gluing the bridge in once ,and of course it budged a bit sideways when I wasn`t looking.(as they do). It`s not a nasty job tho is it? Trust your own ears when you do that job.

[John Cadd]

Here`s a second bite at the subject.I think you need to have the 12th frets all spot on as the spacing of the frets is all worked out already.The bit I find confusing is what happens at either end.I have a Spanish guitar ,not expensive but accurately made,but the nut to 1st fret is much larger than the accepted distance should be.All the rest are exactly correct relative to each other BUT on a scale that is longer than the one on my guitar.I think this is connected to the overall stifness of the whole guitar.By the way it is a very well tuned guitar with octaves spot on. I also have a nice Marc Silber flamenco with a carbon reinforcement in the neck and technically (measurement-wise ) it is going in the opposite direction.Both nicely in tune and sounding great.A puzzle.