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With the bridge glued on and the white bone saddle
roughed
out, it is time to string the guitar up for the first time. In
preparation, I had to mount the tuning heads into the holes I had
already drilled. I bought this set of Martin guitar tunings head on
EBay. |
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A better view of the glued on bridge and the white
bone
saddle. You can see the pencil marks I made on the guitar's top to help
in positioning the bridge. |
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Here is the guitar with its first set of strings.
You can
see that I have notched the nut for the strings and have set the
initial action of the guitar. The saddle is still a bit high but I will
work on this later. After this I played the guitar for the first time.
It has a small intonation problem that I can probably fix. Actually it
sounds pretty good except for a sitar like buzz from the 3rd or G
string that I have yet to track down. The guitar sounds good enough to go ahead and spend the time (and money) on a nice finish. If the guitar had sounded bad I was going to use a can of clear lacquer and spend just enough time on the finish so I could hang the guitar in my studio as a non functional decoration. It was a wonderful feeling to play this guitar for the first time and have it sound good. |
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A view of the saddle before I finished setting up
the
action. I had to create a string relief slot for each string (with a
file) which allows the bridge pins to be pushed down into the string
hole but yet allows the string to pass through. This slot cannot be
seen here as it is between the bridge pins and the saddle. After I set the final action the guitar plays just about as good as any guitar I have though the neck is slightly larger around than I like because of my small hands. |