Focus on the Task, Attention to Detail, Commitment to Follow Through…these are the watch words of the ADD among us. This week we will talk about a lapse I had in the attention to some pretty obvious details and start dealing with the consequences.
I know some of you are wondering “what’s going on at Funhouse, it’s been a long time since a post”. It’s been a strange confluence of family home for the holiday’s, a few job interviews, a bit of sickness thrown in for good measure and way too much waiting for parts. But let us cast off this holiday lethargy and charge boldly into the New Year for I am well and new parts are flowing in daily.
When last we left our funky Washburn A10 I was fashioning a nut for it. You can only basically shape the nut before it’s time to mark it for string slots…. And to mark it for string slots you need to know where the strings will lie. Oh sure, you can say that for a given neck width you should have this mathematical spacing. But given a set of tuners and a bridge you can see where the strings “want” to lie. There’s only one problem with this and that was I had not decided on what kind of bridge I wanted. Just before the holidays hit I finally set to marking up the body for a simple Les Paul Jr style wrap around bridge mounted on traditional 3.25” spacing posts. In keeping with my “this is going to be a cheap guitar” theme I’d ordered a Chinese knock off that looked pretty good and actually felt like it might be made of brass like the good ones. I’d measured the scale length and marked off the geometry on the body (how nice to have a light colored finish I don’t care about!). I was holding the bridge in place to get a feel for how it would look when it occurred to me… “OMG this bridge is WAY too high! How can that be!?!?” In thinking about it and looking over the guitar it occurred to me that I had never really looked at the relationship of the neck to the body. I’d assumed that since this was a mini-Gibson Explorer clone that this guitar had an angled neck. It doesn’t. It’s flat like a Fender Strat.
What am I talking about?
Many Gibson style guitars (SG, Les Paul, 3xx, etc.) have the neck in one plane and the surface of the body in another. The neck is angled back from the body so a high bridge has a nice low action shot to the nut and tuners. You can see this in the picture above the guitar on the left (my Yamaha 335 clone). On the right you can see that the Washburn’s body is clearly in the same plane as the neck. Also the Washburn has a set neck so I can’t adjust the neck angle at all. So I need a different kind of bridge. On my blue guitar I have force an angle with a wedge in the neck pocket so I have a Tele-esq body and a Gibson style tail piece. On a new body I recently aquired the neck pocket came routed with an appropriate angle so no tone stealing wedge is needed.
After looking around I opted for a Schaller hard tail bridge.
It’s a roller bridge for reasons that escape me but the key feature I like is that it’s top loaded. That is the string simple load from the back of the bridge and I won’t have to drill holes through the body like I would for a standard Strat tail piece. This can be an expensive piece of black anodized brass hardware with some pretty trick machined parts. I think I’ve seen it list for over $90. I managed to find it on eBay for around $70. It’s the most I’ve spent on this guitar for any single component but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.
So I’ll be marking out the mounting lines for this bridge this week. From first glance I think it will look great but it confirms something I knew I would have to face eventually. I will have to make a new pick guard because the bridge extends fairly far forward of the ideal bridge/string contact line. I haven’t made a pick guard in 25 years so that should be a good learning experience for all of us.
Also ahead we’ll be talking about how to evaluate a potential used guitar buy (I found a real beauty this week), a paint repair issue on my beloved Collings D2H, and some mundane but important cleaning tips.
Happy New Year!
Jim