I SPENT a little time today in the workshop making bridges for the tenors. Then my wife and I took a two mile walk to the Farmers Market downtown for lunch, then another two miles back. Then I took my two string bass "El Doble" to the Bellingham Ukulele Group entertainment for an assisted living home across town. About a dozen of us played for about 40 senior citizens and I played "El Doble" the entire time. Learned quite a bit thanks to Pat McDonald who played his U bass and explained some of the basics of bass playing. His best advice, "Don't worry about missing the notes, just don't lose the beat" . I found he was exactly right. It was a lot of fun.
Here is my jig for cutting the saddle slots in the bridge. This is another of those sleds that slides up and down in the grooves of the saw table. One side of this is for cutting straight slots for un-compensated saddles, the lower part of the jig cuts an angled slot for a compensated saddle. I make both kinds depending on the instrument.
You simply put the bridge blank into the jig | then hold it down tight with a safety device like the above, and run it through the saw. Oh yeah! you want to carefully adjust the height of the saw blade to cut the groove just as deep as you want it. And here you have the bridge with saddle groove cut. Now take it to the spindle sander and taper down the ends to a pleasing degree and then to the belt sander to taper down the top surface behind the groove where you will be either installing string pins, or drilling holes to pass the strings thru. This is a pretty simple process- you may want to relieve the corners a bit to give a little swing to this highly visible part of your ukulele. |