What we’ve got is a tailpiece installed on this Takamine. It’s anchoring the strings which pass through the (pinless) bridge and up over the saddles.
Thing is, it’s not the best solution. The tailpiece is resting against the top of the guitar with isn’t the best for getting a good tone. Also, the guitar’s designed to have strings couple to the bridge for good transfer to the top.
You can see the problem this was trying to solve. The original bridge had cracked and was starting to disintegrate where the strings anchored.
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Along the way, someone had installed a third bolt right in the middle to try keep it together. You can see the filler sunken in between the D and G strings at the rear or the bridge. These bridges already have a couple of bolts installed to help keep them from ripping free and flying across the room. Once this crack happened, though, no amount of bolts was going to help.
Since we’re going to avoid the saddle slots with their related awkwardness, I’m going to remove the back half of the bridge. Essentially, I’m just taking off the damaged part.
Removing it is relatively straightforward. I chose to rout off the rear section in a straight line, bringing it close to the top but not quite touching. I finished up with chisels.
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I didn’t rout all the way to the bottom of the bridge because a guitar top has a radius —it’s domed. My router was resting on a makeshift jig (to get that straight line) and wouldn’t have matched this dome.
Also, I couldn’t apply heat to make the glue let go as I wanted to maintain good adhesion on the front section. Routers and chisels is the way to go.
The basic shape of the new bridge is easy enough to rough out of a rosewood blank. Then some ‘finessing’ to get it to shape. It’s important to get the ‘footprint’ correct but I’ve left it higher than the existing bridge.
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Drilling the mounting holes and the string holes needs a bit of care as you don’t want these to be misaligned of out of place.
As there was already a third hole in the guitar top (one more than would usually have been there) I chose to go with a third bolt on this repair. I wouldn’t have added it unless there was already a hole but I figured it’d give some more security since it was already there.
Once everything has been shaped and cut, we still need to pay attention to the bottom of the repair piece. Remember that ‘dome’ on the guitar top? the bottom of this piece should match that so it mates well. Glueing a flat piece of wood on a domed surface can be problematic. Some fiddly sanding of the bottom will give me a good match.
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You can see from the photo below that I’ve installed two of the three bolts. These aren’t actually tightened down as part of the glueing —they’re just there to help align things and keep the piece from slipping around.
Incidentally, that large wooden cam clamp bears some explanation. You would, ordinarily, never clamp onto the middle of a soundboard like this as you could damage it. I have a couple of jacks installed inside the guitar to prevent the clamp ‘crushing’ the top or back. Even so, I was pretty careful with the pressure applied —I just wanted to ensure the rear of the piece was properly mated.
Once the glue is dry, I can take the top down to the correct height with a sharp chisel. It’s much easier to do this in place than to try get a match off the guitar. Some sanding and clean up and I can install a couple of inlay pieces to cover the bolts.
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It probably won’t be as much of a conversation starter as a honking great tailpiece but I reckon the guitar looks and sounds a lot better now. This Tak lives to fight another day.Acoustic guitars can be designed to sound good, or can be designed to last – it can’t really be both. Most builders try to find a middle ground, and many are very successful at finding a perfect balance. However, guitars are mostly made of wood, and sometimes wood just won’t cooperate. Occasionally we see this kind of problem: an acoustic bridge coming off. This particular guitar was rather problematic, and we were told that several other luthiers didn’t want to even attempt to fix it. But we’re the type of people that just can’t say no to a challenge, so here we go!
Here’s some preliminary shots of what this guitar looked like when it came in. This was probably the worst case of an acoustic bridge lifting we’ve ever seen: the bridge was coming off, the top had severely warped, and the bridge plate underneath the top was cracked and misshapen. Oof!
Someone had previously attempted to fix this, and did a rather poor job of it. They had glued the bridge back down without properly addressing the root issue of the top deflecting, and to make matters worse they bolted the bridge down!
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Whenever we’re dealing with a poorly done repair, it just makes the repair all the more difficult. While we certainly don’t try to discourage people from attempting to repair things on their own, just bear in mind that you might screw it up and make things worse! This one was going to be a doozy.
The first thing I needed to do was to remove the bridge, which was made somewhat difficult with the bolts that had been installed. The bolt heads were hidden under some pearl dots, and I didn’t want to risk drilling the inlays out lest I strip out the bolt heads and put myself in a heap of trouble getting them out. So instead, after removing the nuts from the inside of the guitar, I put my soldering iron inside against the bolts, which would melt the glue holding the dots in place. Once the glue melted, I was able to push the bolts up from the inside.
With the bolts removed, I heated the bridge with a heat lamp to melt the little bit of glue still holding the bridge on, and lifted it off the top with a knife. It came off pretty clean, all things considered:
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Believe it or not, removing the bridge was the easy part. Next, I had to remove the broken bridge plate inside. I fashioned a way to introduce heat to the inside of the guitar, softening the glue holding bridge plate to the top, and then spent the better part of an hour with a short chisel prying it off. It came off in pieces, and it wasn’t surprising when it took some of the top with it. I said this was going to be a doozy!
Since the top was so compromised, some of it came off with the bridge plate. I had five small pieces of spruce that I salvaged from the mess, and very meticulously glued them all back together, like so:
Next I pressed the top back flat, utilizing heat, some Thompson cauls, and a plank of oak. After a couple of treatment sessions, the top was in much better shape.
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With the top in decent shape and all the loose braces taken care of, it was time to put a bridge plate in place. I made a general outline of the shape from the broken pieces I had, and made a new plate out of rosewood. Then I made a caul out of plywood of the same shape for the clamps to attach to. This was a fairly large piece to glue, and I didn’t want to take any chances with any part of it not getting fully glued to the top – so I may have gone a little overboard with my clamping situation:
Next I shaped the bridge to fit the new shape of the top. This is a tedious process of attaching some sandpaper over the top, sanding the bridge a bit, remove the sandpaper, check for fit, repeat… repeat…repeat… This is really important, because if the bridge isn’t making full contact with the top it could open the door for it to pull off again, and ain’t nobody got time for that. Once satisfied, I glued it down, drilled string holes into the new bridge plate, and reinstalled bolts and inlays (the bolts weren’t entirely necessary anymore, but since there was already holes in the bridge, might as well use them).
Lastly, I opted to install a JLD Bridge Doctor, which would reinforce the top by deflecting some of the tension of the strings from the top to the tail block. We normally only use these when absolutely necessary (as was this case), but they absolutely work. Since the top of this guitar was so severely compromised and the owner uses heavy gauge strings, I felt it was better safe than sorry.
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The final test was to string it up and see if it didn’t completely explode
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