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Old 12-06-2017, 03:52 PM
Chicago Chicago is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2017
Posts: 18
Talking Bridge re-glue affected tone. Trying to find a fix

My Seagull S6 Folk has always been my "experimental" guitar for trying new luthier related projects. The bridge was lifting and I decided that this would be a good time to learn about bridge removal/regluing. Well it's a good thing that I used a Seagull instead of something more valuable for my first attempt, as I have some problems that I need to fix. After the repair, the high strings sound slightly dead, and the lower strings sound tinny compared to how they used to sound. All around, the guitar has lost some richness and power. I have a few ideas as to the cause and how to fix it, but I wanted to run my thoughts by the folks on this forum to get your two cents before I proceed.

During the removal process, I didn't go slowly enough and I ended up ripping out a thin piece of cedar from the top (it remained attached to the bottom of the bridge). I opted to use heat and steam to remove this section, and regule it to the top prior to prepping the surface to accept the bridge. In the pictures, you can see the footprint of the re-glued cedar. I suspect that this could have something to do with the issues, but I'm not totally sure.

I also had to remove about .01 inches of wood from the top to smooth out the surrounding damage from the cedar tear-out that occured when I removed the bridge- i.e. the bridge is inlaid about .01 into the surface of the guitar.

Because I had to remove some extra wood from the top under the bridge footprint, I was unable to achieve a perfectly flat gluing surface. The sides on the bridge footprint were nice and level, but the center of the footprint dipped by about .015 in the center. I figured it would be best to leave it be, as I wanted to remove as little material as possible, and the top could easily flex to close up that .015 gap under the pressure of the clamps.

This guitar also had an under saddle pickup at one point, and some glue seeped into the the saddle slot through the hole that the pickup wire ran through. I cleaned the glue out of the slot using water, paper towels, and q-tips, but I'm thinking that perhaps there could still be some residue that is raising the side of the saddle, not allowing it to seat properly, or that the wood on that side may have swelled and remained enlarged due to the mixture of water and wood glue (again, causing the bridge to not seat properly).


My current plan is to get one of the saddle slot files from Stewmac to see if leveling the bottom of the slot will fix the problem.

If that is ineffective, I plan to remove the bridge again (hopefully correctly this time), and shave away some wood under the bridges footprint and the surrounding area to completely remove the remnants of damage/re glued cedar that remain from my first removal attempt, and to achieve a perfectly flat surface.

What do you guys think of this analysis? Am I missing anything? Would you recommend that I do something different. I'd really like to hear your opinions so that I can dive back into this project with confidence and a solid game plan.





Last edited by Chicago; 12-06-2017 at 04:10 PM.
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