How To
How To Install Tune-O-Matic Bridge Posts - Click here to download the PDF version of this article Important: Before starting to install the tune-o-matic bridge posts make sure the neck and fingerboard are in their final positions. This is important because the position of the bridge on the body is highly dependent on the fingerboard and the nut. Since the strings vibrate […]
How To Make A Neck Pocket - In this post, I’ll show you how I made the neck pocket on the lower part of the body of the guitar. This is a quick and dirty way of doing it… Step 1: Position the neck on the body according to your design and align the body and neck center-lines perfectly. I used a […]
- How To Install Tune-O-Matic Bridge Posts - Click here to download the PDF version of this article Important: Before starting to install the tune-o-matic bridge posts make sure the neck and fingerboard are in their final positions. This is important because the position of the bridge on the body is highly dependent on the fingerboard and the nut. Since the strings vibrate […]
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Hello. I found you doing a google search on locating a bridge on an electric guitar.. I’m putting together a kit soon, but I think I’ll actually build an electric short scale, or shorter than normal scale electric guitar in the future out of wood from Indiana. My brother has a bunch of Walnut / black walnut for bodies and a bunch of birdseye maple for necks.. as well as a wood shop.. So, I’m going to try my hand at building a very simple short scale (23″ or 24″) single cutaway guitar with 22 frets.. Medium tall, etc,.. Thanks so much for this info on the locating the bridge. I have the Melvin Hiscock book on building guitars and it helped a lot, but this is a better way of finding where the bridge should be. Does this work on a Fender hard tail bridge as well ?
Hi Tim,
I think starting with a kit guitar project is a great idea, it will get your feet wet…
A few things about building from scratch:
1. When you say “short scale” I assume you mean “short scale length”… Unless you know how to calculate fret distances and properly cut fret slots in a fingerboard, I recommend to go with standard electric guitar scale lengths and buy a pre-slotted fingerboard. The big manufacturers have standard scale lengths of 24.75″ for Gibsons, 25″ for PRS and 25.5″ for Fenders (see a great description of scale lengths here http://www.stewmac.com/freeinfo/Fretting/a-scalelength.html ) You can create a guitar with a different scale length for sure, but it also means a lot of work.
2. The Melvin Hiscock book is good but I don’t necessarily think it’s very practical for finding information in an easy manner… It’s written too much like a novel with no separation of subjects… The book that I highly recommend is Building Electric Guitars by Martin Koch. It’s highly detailed, easy to read, many diagrams and more of a step-by-step approach.
3. The approach outlined in this article should work for finding the bridge position on any guitar. Just make the necessary modifications for the specific hardware of a Fender bridge type.
I have a Gibson les paul double cut away with the whip stop bar tailpiece. What I would like to do is add the tuno’matic bridge. I think the holes that are there will work for the bridge but I would need to drill holes for the stop bar tailpiece. Is that possible?