Wide saddle

[ken cierp]

The saddle is angled to help intontion in general (more string length for thicker cores) -- never heard the rotation thing, franlkly that makes no sense at all to me? When Dave lays out his 1/4" saddle the thicker cored strings will touch off farther away from the nut side of the saddle. Angling shaves of the portion of the saddle that will not be used -- some would tell you that's important since it is actually could be a weight reduction -- and I am one of those.

[John Parchem]

Sorry I am confused, I thought the discussion was about the saddle being angled relative to plane of the top, not the normal angle done on almost all steel strings to compensate for the thicker bass strings.

[ken cierp]

Got it!

Yeah that's another good topic -- one of my original suppliers sent me a batch of bridges made with the sadddle slot tiltted toward the tail block -- that sorta makes sense if the assumption is that the string tension pulling down into the pin hole will not distort the saddle position. I am not convienced, but I think some imports use bridges machined like that.

[Dave Bagwill]

I was talking about the slot angle like so: see pic.



Tim - yeah yeah, funny guy....:-)

[Tim Benware]

Depending on where you position it, with a 1/4" saddle the angle would not have to be as severe (if any) compared to a thinner (1/8 or 3/16) to make your compensation. As to weight I wonder if carving out more wood compared to having more bone is a wash.

[Dave Bagwill]

Those pesky oval holes aside, I went to the shop and laid a 1/4" saddle over a typical slanted-slot bridge and in a sketch it would look like this, sorta; so there is a lot of additional intonation area if it is needed, unless you need to move the E string further back in which case you don't really gain much, or on the e string if you need to move it way forward. But those would be extremes.

[ken cierp]

If the bridge is made of Ebony, the bone width that fills the slot is 60% heavier than the wood that was removed plus the material that makes up the height of the saddle.