[pianotech] alternative to new bridge

[Delwin D Fandrich]

I've done both. I cut the bridge and reset it to shorten the scale on a long
Sohmer grand that used agrafes on the bridges. The owner wanted to keep the
agrafes but duplicating that thing would have been extremely costly. Still,
I needed to shorten up the strings some -- I thought 260+ lbf on the
mid-tenor and lower-treble strings was a bit much! -- so I cut the bridge
(underneath the frame struts) into three pieces and relocated them. I
spliced in wood as needed to fill the gaps and splined the pieces back
together. Worked very nicely. 

I've also built up existing bridges by adding thick veneers as needed and
recapping. The only real downside is that to keep an appropriate width
you'll probably need to take some wood off of the front side of the bridge
which will almost certainly cut through some of the original veneers. Can
look unsightly unless you also put a fresh piece of veneer on the front side
to hide everything. 

In the end it comes down to which approach -- modifying the original or
building up on a new body -- takes the most time and materials and costs
either you or the owner them most (or least) amount of money.

ddf

Delwin D Fandrich
Piano Design & Fabrication
6939 Foothill Court SW, Olympia, Washington 98512 USA
Phone  360.515.0119 — Cell  360.388.6525
del at fandrichpiano.com — ddfandrich at gmail.com


-----Original Message-----
From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf
Of Gene Nelson
Sent: Sunday, September 09, 2012 4:09 PM
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Subject: [pianotech] alternative to new bridge


After calculating a new scale, I have the lower tenor part of the bridge
figured ok - adding 5 bi-chords and a shorter aux bridge joined to the
original. 
However, the upper tenor to the top is another question. 
>From note 53 to the lo-tenor works out very well but note 54 to the top
requires that I lengthen the spl's by 10mm tapering to 3mm in order to get a
decent scale. Means a big dog leg at the strut.
I thought of adding material to the back side of the bridge and machining
the opposite to keep the bridge width close to original. 
Or - possibly cutting the bridge at the strut, repositioning 3mm back at the
top and just rotating it to get the 10 mm at the strut, then rejoining with
epoxy and a new bridge cap and maybe a couple of filler pieces to help round
it off at the dog leg. Anybody think that cutting the bridge like that would
be a bad idea?? It's probably a bit less work.
Gene