Bridge

Now that I have 3 weeks to watch the finish cure, I thought I'd take the time to quickly make a bridge. I'm using a piece of Amazon Rosewood that I got from Allied Lutherie to match my back and sides. First I had to rough out a 6" x 1.5" x 3/8" blank using my sanding board:

Ok now my forearms look like Popeye. Too bad I still have to design and draw my bridge template. Shaky arms. Shaky arms. Ok the throbbing has subsided, back to making nice curves...

After transferring my bridge design to the rosewood blank, I carefully drilled the bridge pin holes and a series of tiny connected holes that will later be chiseled out to make room for the bone bridge.

After attacking it with a sanding drum on a drill press, here's the roughed out shape--I'll begin carving down the sides and edges next.

The next photo shows a straight edge clamped down and being used as a guide so that I might chisel out a straight 3/32" wide chanel for the bone saddle. I couldn't find a 3/32" chisel anywhere, so I bought a crappy cheap 1/8" chisel and used a sanding drum on a drill press to take 1/32" off the width of the chisel. I chose to use the chisel method form the book rather than setting up a complicated router angle jig. So far it's working alright...

Here's the bridge with the saddle slot roughed out. I still need to reduce the thickness of the bridge a little I think and do all those fine sanding / curving / chamfering things, but it's progressing well:

Finalyl after some distractions and putting it down for a while, I've reduced the thickness of the bridge a bit more, refined its shape, deepend the saddle slot, and buffed it with some fine steel wool. Here are a couple more pics, but it's hard to see it well without a saddle, bridge pins and good lighting.