Acoustic Guitar Construction

That would be good to know, Pete...

I would be more concerned with the sonic effect. Will it dampen the vibration, be neutral or enhance the vibrations.

Well, for what it's worth intuitively, wood makes lousy bells, metal pretty good ones. So much for facts. I don't know about c/f as bell material. I think (as in don't know but am attracted to the idea) that grounding the string ends to metal would transmit vibration into the soundboard better than grounding them to wood. But I'm trafficking in my own assumptions about materials.

We've all heard about the CF 'stradavarius' that sounded better than the originals in blind testing with experts.
It may not follow that cf makes a better bridge plate material than wood, but it does not necessarily follow that it is not a better material either.

Yeah, that's why one would have to try it to see and again it would probably come down to that old "preference" gene.

Peter, the neat thing about the plate mate is it is very easy to remove it if you don't like it. If you're interested send me your mailing address along with the string spacing you'll be using and I'll mail you one to try out.

Tim, I'm using up a lot of the components that came with the US Guitar Kits instrument I've been mumbling about. I'm reluctant to take a favor and not use it immediately. Thanks very much for your generous offer, but I'll do this on my own. Just for amusement, the rosewood bridge that came with the kit sanded out nicely and I'll use it. Its string spacing is also a funky number, 2 5/32". Between the very small centering holes in the E and e string positions. 55mm is noticeably larger, so I think the English dimension is valid. I'll make up my own plate by match-drilling the bridge when the time comes to drill through the bottoms of the bridge pin holes to finished size. Won't take long and no one will have wasted any effort.

peter havriluk wrote:Tim, I'm using up a lot of the components that came with the US Guitar Kits instrument I've been mumbling about. I'm reluctant to take a favor and not use it immediately. Thanks very much for your generous offer, but I'll do this on my own. Just for amusement, the rosewood bridge that came with the kit sanded out nicely and I'll use it. Its string spacing is also a funky number, 2 5/32". Between the very small centering holes in the E and e string positions. 55mm is noticeably larger, so I think the English dimension is valid. I'll make up my own plate by match-drilling the bridge when the time comes to drill through the bottoms of the bridge pin holes to finished size. Won't take long and no one will have wasted any effort.

OK. That's probably just supposed to be a 2 1/8" bridge spacing.