Official Luthiers Forum!

You know, now that I think of it this pattern \\\\\\\\ viewed from the top does seem to have some good sense to it. That way your saddle slot is not on one particular plane and your bridge pins are isolated as well.

grumpy wrote:
"An idea is not "stolen" if the originator freely passed-on the knowledge, no?"

Yes, Rick did share that one, and many such ideas are pretty freely passed around among North American luthiers. It's one reason we've come so far in the past thirty years or so.

There are always ideas that are just 'floating around', and seem to be adopted by a number of folks more or less at the same time. My old partner and I discussed the problem of necks shifting, and came up with the idea of using an 'A' brace inletted into the neck block to cure it. Later I heard about the Martin patent. I'm pretty sure I started using this before they took their patent out, but, at any rate, I know it was an independent invention.

Short of taking out a patent, and defending it strenuously, I'm not sure how you could retain intellectual property rights on most of this stuff: keep people from 'stealing' these ideas. I remember Chris Martin musing at a convention once that it would have been nice if they'd taken out a patent on the Dreadnought shape, but then somebody pointed out that it would have lapsed by now anyway. Still, they might have made some money while it was in force.

Anyway, the real import of what I said was simply that there are a lot of good ideas out there, and it pays to keep your eyes and mind open. Often it's the best makers who seem to have more of the good ideas, so it's wise, as Don says, to pay particular attention to what they're doing.

Should I make a surrogate saddle to locate a bridge with a tilted saddle slot? Should it be located to the front edge of the saddle or the middle? Does the .020" that I removed from the nut end need to be factored into total string length? Thanks.

_________________
Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from poor judgement.

If you've moved the nut closer to the first fret, to compensate it, then you'll need less compensation at the saddle than usual. You could simply try the trial and error method of setting things up with no compensation at either end, and working it out over a few iterations of moving the contact points back. Alternatively, you could set up a beam rig, with movable nut and saddle pieces and fixed first and 12th frets, and do your fussing around on that. It takes time either way, but with the rig you don't risk messing up a whole nut or saddle by cutting too much off, so it saves time in the long run.