90s Guild Archtop Rosewood Bridge Base

[cc_mac]

Anyone else have a similar underside of the rosewood bridge base on a 90s (or even earlier) Guild Archtop? It may be hard to tell from the photo but what appears to have happened is someone crudely used a small scrapper or rounded chisel to slightly hollow out or rather give the base some concavity to clear the curve of the arched top of the guitar. It seems that was followed up by the more standard method of taping sandpaper to a top and working the base to fit. You can see it was marked "B" and "T" (bass/trebble) in pencil. The result (not quite there in this case) would be to have base/body constant contact fit around the perimeter of the base but the inner area not making contact with the top.

 

[Sleeko]

Hmm, odd. I've not seen that before. Maybe to fine-tune the tone?

 

[txbumper57]

Maybe an amateur tried to chisel it to fit and a Luthier wound up coming back later and sanding it properly. It is possible the amateur chiseled too much off of it and in order to save the base the luthier could only sand it so far for if he sanded the chisel marks out there would not be enough material left for a stable base. I don't think it would affect tone too much as on one of my arch tops I have a 2 piece rosewood base holding a roller tune o matic bridge with no material in the middle at all and it sounds great. Also the bridge at one point could have been fixed on another guitar with a drop of super glue and upon removal it left a piece of the bridge on the top of the guitar. I have seen all of these in my Archtop adventures.:semi-twins:

 

[Harpymorgan]

Most rosewood archtop bridges have this, that the bass and treble feet sit alone with a higher arch to miss the curve of the body. Thats not to say that the bridge cannot have contact all the way across, but the sound will be different, and probably not so bright. I'm sure someone with more knowledge than me, probably Walter, will put some more meat on this explanation, but at the end of the day, if you want to do some experimenting, it comes down to personal taste.

 

[cc_mac]

The bridge is from the 97 Starfire II and I noticed this when I first got the guitar in December of last year. It came with light gauge strings and the bridge slipped south 3/32 of an inch from center. I swapped to .052-012 gauge and put the bridge in the correct alignment and position for intonation. Although it held its position there was also something odd about (not bad but odd) about the sound of the guitar. There was a vague lack of certainty with string attach and shyness regarding sustain and decay. Careful visual inspection showed the perimeter of the base was not making complete surface contact to body. What I believed to be the audible effect of that was amplified when I switched the stock rosewood saddle out for the 1960s Hagstrom Ajustomatic I wrote that up here and it may be of interest to you.

This weekend, I set out to do what I knew needed to be done and reshaped the contour of the bridge base to properly fit the body of the guitar. Although there is still a small area in the center that is scalloped there is much more surface contact area which now mates fully to the body. The difference in clarity of sound was immediately noticeable and pleasing.

I'm going to move ahead with obtaining the GF Hagstrom-esque bridge saddle see how that works with the guitar.

Here's the 97 Starfire II taped up and ready to start the process.