Installing a bridge on an acoustic/electric

[RiffRaff]

Hi all. Thought I would share some info I picked up as I finally got around to fixing two of my old guitars that were just lying around doing nothing.
I have sort of gotten a rejuvenated interest again in broadening my modest musical skills and thought I may as well try to fix a couple of guitars I have.

These guitars are'nt expensive guitars therefore I was'nt really sweating messing things up.

First guitar : Lotus acoustic. Needed new tuning keys and a saddle. This was a pretty straight forward fix. The replaced saddle was given to me at a music store and I replaced the stock plank tuners with new individual tuning keys that cost around 35.00 for the set.

Like I said , nothing special about this guitar. I picked it up at a pawn shop about 20 yrs ago . The Korean company that built these guitars are no longer in business.

The other guitar is a Johnson JG-650-TN acoustic/electric I bought second hand about 7 yrs ago for 75 dollars. The bridge deteriored and was broken badly and became unplayable.

I read a few articles on bridge replacement and decided to try it. I picked up the bridge for 15 bucks and purchased a heat gun . The heat gun has two settings . 500 degrees and 1000 degrees.

I used the low setting and protected the sound board around the bridge by taping it off good with masking tape.

I read somewhere since I removed it that you should'nt apply heat over 210 degrees to the guitar.

It took awhile for the glue to soften up but it finally did. Did'nt seem to do any damage to the guitar.

I was'nt sure really how I was going to get the dowels lined up (that come up through the soundboard under the bridge and into the underneath of the bridge .

The solution I came up with was laying the bottom of the bridge down on a piece of thin poster board and cutting around the bridge to get a perfect outline of the bridge.

Then I taped the cutout down to the soundboard exactly where the bridge would be place and use a razor blade to cut out the postion of the dowels and the access hole where the pickup comes up through the body and into the bridge.

This was my template . I then taped this to the bottom of the bridge and drilled out the countersinks for the dowels to fit into. It worked out perfect .

As a sidenote . This bridge did not have the tuning peg holes drilled all the way through so this has to be done also. Not sure if this is usual or not.

I thought things would be downhill from here on but I was wrong. The slot for the saddle was a little to narrow for the pickup and not deep enough either for both the pickup and saddle.

The solution was to purchase a Dremel kit. The little mult-purpose cutter bit that looks like a regular drill bit was the perfect width and it was not difficult at all to get the desired depth .

After I did the sanding and other prep I glued the bridge in place earlier today using Franklin Titebond and c-clamped it .

I know I probably did'nt do things quite (by-the-book) but things are looking good. Not sure I would use the same techniques or even attempt this on an expensive guitar but it gave me some pleasure to do it myself and rescue these cheap guitars from the scrap-heap.

Would appreciate any comments from posters who know more about this type of fix. Tempertures , techniques, etc.

[RiffRaff]

Thought I would update the bridge install progress . Apparently I picked up some wrong info on what type of glue to use to attach a bridge to an acoustic guitar.

I read several articles that recommended Franklins Titebond . Well I used the liquid hideTitebond wood glue and followed the directions . Even clamped it for 24 hours the second go around.

This glue did'nt hold for me. I have since researched glues further and will just go with good old Elmers white glue . I have worked with this in the past on other wood projects .

Just wished I had known the Titebond in the brown bottle is'nt really suitable for high stress repairs before hand.

Just don'nt want someone else making this same mistake.

[chilitea]

I tried to lower strings on my Yamaha acoustic electric buy removing the white bar in the bridge and sanding it. This piece was in three separate pieces and I had trouble pulling them out of the slot. Also some metallic looking material under this piece. did I just break some type of electronic connection for the pick up? Or can I proceed with sanding and have a little better action? Yamaha APX-6n classic. suggestions?