Making A Bridge With Hand Tools

no electrons sacrificed...

The classical guitar bridge is pretty simple: just a  rectangular piece of wood with some longitudinal grooves.  It's a pretty straightforward procedure with a table saw and/or router table - once the machines are properly set up you can run a lot of wood through and make many bridges in fairly short order (although it still requires some hand work). 

 However, you are no doubt asking yourself:  "how would Roy Underhill make a guitar bridge?"  Not to mention: how did Antonio de Torres, Manuel Ramirez, Santos Hernandez, et al. make their bridges?  (If any of these names are unfamiliar to you, please Wikipedia them.)  

The common thread there is the use of hand tools only.  Here are the tools I used to make the bridge in this post:

 

And here are the raw materials; a hunk of Indian Rosewood, a piece of bone, and a couple thin strips of veneer of contrasting colors:

The bridge can be thought of as two sections: the center part with the tie block and saddle, and the sides, or outer "wings".  While there are many ways to proceed, on this bridge I'm first separating the center part from the wings. The wings are lower than the center, so I'm creating a space to either side that will allow work on the center part of the bridge. 

I used a plow plane to create these grooves, but other tools could be used to achieve the same result.

 A fret saw is used to remove a couple this strips from the piece of bone.  These will be inlaid around the tie block.  Besides being decorative, the bone inlay prevents the strings from digging into the wood.  The thin veneer strips will be glued to one side of the bone strips - not necessary but looks nice.  The piece of bone that's left will be used for the bridge saddle.

  The excess width is sawed off using my indespensible custom-made Mike Wenzloff small rip saw.

The bone strips have been glued into a small recess around the tie block.  The corners are mitered, and it took a while to get the fit good!

 Shaping the wings and the ramp behind the saddle...

The string holes have been drilled (with the eggbeater drill) and some finish applied (oil varnish in this case).

 Here are a couple completed bridges, one showing how the bone saddle fits into place (of course it is only roughly shaped at this point).