Submitted for your approval, One man. One bridge blank. the goal? To make a pinless bridge. Will he succeed? Only time will tell.
You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!
Also a dimension of bridges that are not constrained by pins. And the next stop is really the next sentence in this post, but the dramatic intro was kind of fun.
Anyway, here is how I made a pinless bridge. I don't have much in the way of power tools. Just a cheap, little drill press and a drum sander. I used both for this bridge, but it can be done without the drum sander. Not sure about the drill press though. It seems like it would be tough to drill perfectly perpendicular holes without it, but it could probably be done.
This is not the only way to do this, just the way I did it.
First I cut the bridge blank to size. I used standard Martin belly bridge dimensions which I procured from the Stew Mac web site.
Then I marked the center of the bridge and the locations of the two E strings. I am using 2.25" spacing on this guitar. Once I had those measurements established, I used my string spacing ruler to lay out the locations of the remaining strings. I don't think it would make any difference if I simply made each string equally spaced but I have the ruler, so why not use it?
I then used my drill press to drill the holes for the strings through the back edge of the bridge. Be sure to note the extensive clamping I used to avoid the bridge moving around during drilling. Oh...there are no clamps in this pic? Well I used my right hand during the actual drilling. That is sort of clamp like, no? This pic is staged. I used a 5/64" bit for these holes. I determined this was a good size by guessing. Or by drilling a hole in scrap. I'm not telling which it was.
After drilling the holes, I used a 7/32" bit to countersink the holes. I put tape on the drill bit to keep it from going too deep. I tried to make the countersinks deep enough to almost completely cover the ball ends. I didn't want to go too deep and risk compromising the strength of the back of the bridge. Though in hind site, it would probably not have made much difference if the counter sink were deeper.
I wanted to have about .25" of wood from the back of the bridge to the beginning of the slot where the strings start to go up to the saddle. It seemed to me that the saddle would raise the strings up sufficiently that I need not worry about the angle of the ramp in the string slot area. I used the set up in the next pic to slot the bridge and also to cut the slot for the string access.
I wound up with the mess below after cutting the two slots. Once the slot in the back of the bridge was cut, I used a chisel and a dremel with various attachments to cut the ramp.
The curved lines are where I would shape the wings. I used a very precise method for establishing the curves, namely a roll of blue painters tape because the radius was the right size out of all the things laying on my bench at the time.
True story.
I wasn't worried that the slot in the back of the bridge was sloppy. I was going to hack away at it with various sharp and pointy things anyway. After a bunch of sanding, chiseling and a quick wipe with Danish Oil, here is what the bridge looks like:
There you have it. I pretty much made this up as I went along. I had three bridge blanks to work with if I messed up the first, but it all worked out. I had a vision in my head of what I wanted the finished product look like and I figured out as I went along how to get there.
If I missed anything that might need filling in, I will do my best to explain but these are all the pics I took of the process. Well...except for this one:
but it shows less detail than this one:
so I went with #2.
Thanks for looking!
Tony
![[:Y:]](./images/smilies/smiley20.gif "Thumbs Up")
I appreciate the short and scary ride through your mind ! 
Also, your right foot is a bit out of focus in the last pic. 