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Old 12-20-2016, 08:54 AM
Alan Carruth Alan Carruth is offline
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I usually use walnut for bridges on domestic wood guitars. It's not as dense or strong as a rosewood, but works out well. I make the bridges a little bigger than I would with rosewood, particularly leaving more material in front of the saddle slot to avoid any chance of breaking out. The lower density means that the bridge ends up at about the right weight, and you get more gluing surface so there's less chance of it pulling up. you could, of course, use Osage for that, and work it just like BRW. The Osage I have is ring porous, and you'll want to pay attention to the grain direction to minimize the chance of a split out in front. Not that it's too much of a worry; that stuff is awfully hard to split.

Cherry is a great substitute for the harder sorts of mahogany, in my experience. It's no accident that the Colonial furniture makers in Philadelphia and NYC used cherry when they wanted to copy the latest English mahogany furniture of Hepplewhite and Chippendale, which was made of Cuban mahogany.
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