Double Bass Beech wood bass bridge

[Kentos]

When I bought an EUB, the beech wood bridge was come with it. I ordered a despiau B grade bridge to luthier to fit into my EUB. However,the bass sounded better with beech than despiau. I wonder how it sounds with an upright bass. Has anyone tried it?

 

[DoubleMIDI]

I once talked with a luthier about beech for a bridge and he told me that beech would indeed be possible to be used for a bridge.
That was when I thought about replacing a bad EUB bridge with heavy adjusters (Stagg) with something better (non-adjustable purely wooden bridge with better crown shape and longer legs).

But I haven‘t made one for years now …

 

[james condino]

A good luthier can make a very nice bridge from almost any material; the challenge is selling it to dogmatic maple traditionalists.

 

[Ed Fuqua]

A good luthier can make a very nice bridge from almost any material; the challenge is selling it to dogmatic maple traditionalists.

Not that I’ve got any skin in this game, but I don’t recall EVER asking what material a bridge was made out of.
Anyway, how many luthiers out there carve a bridge entirely from a raw block of wood? My understanding is that most luthiers buy bridge blanks from a variety of sources and then carve the blank to fit whatever bass to which they are fitting it. So isn’t that on the blank producers and luthiers rather than the end user?

So James, have you carved a bridge out of a block of raw wood and if so, how much time difference (that is, billable hours) is there between carving and fitting from a blank?

 

[james condino]

Here is a modest description of the process:

I make entire basses from blocks of wood (many species); sometimes from logs or boards that I purchase. Many times I've cut the trees or harvested naturally downed trees, bucked them by hand with a giant crosscut saw and then into billets with a sledgehammer and a wedge, patiently air dried them for years, and made the whole instrument from that. Additionally, I've made them from carbon fiber, aluminum, lexan, and a few other materials. There was a time when as a young grommet, I worked for the US forest service as a backcountry ranger in the John Muir WIlderness and cut giant redwoods by hand. One slice would take two of us 8+ hours with a two person 14 foot long crosscut saw.

If I were to make my own bridge blanks from a block of raw wood, the billable hours would be negligible. Most commercial bridge blanks still need about 3-5 hours "messin' with". When I first started, it seemed like they took a couple of days. Now I'm reasonably proficient and have a good process worked out with some dedicated jigs and such, but there is so much variability in bass geometry that they still need a lot of hand work. I'll call it 80% semi skilled and 15% skilled work.

For whatever combination of reasons, the violin building world has centuries of tradition whereby most builders always make the body and the neck, but they tend to purchase all of the other fittings: bridges, tuning machines / pegs, tailpieces, et cetera from shops that specialize in the production of fittings.

Commercial bridge blanks arrive very oversized, need to have the feet fit, guillotined, adjusters cut, drilled, & tapped, the entire top needs to be profiled and shaped, then lastly it gets cleaned up to look nice and usually varnished so it does not look like a young boomer struttin' a pair of white velcro tennies in 1983 (or half of talkbass last Tuesday!!!). If an uncut commercial bridge blank costs me an average of $75 (without the adjusters) and I needed to make ten of them, I'd make up a series of pattern or routing jigs (no cnc in my shop) and I could make 10 of them in an easy day. Once I got good at it, probably 2-3 times that amount; maybe one every 20 minutes. (In a factory it would be one every 20 seconds, cnc or not). If I conservatively billed that out at $75 per hour ( many shops charge double or more that), then I just saved $50 off purchasing a commercial bridge.

I make all kinds of hipster bridges for my own projects; when they come that way, nobody complains. 90% of my customers, given a choice, like seeing that Despiau brand visible every time they look down at the bridge and they also often like the familiarity of the shape....so it seems like I buy enough Despiau's every year to purchase a decent running car. My most satisfying bridge dork days look more like this:

'Hope that helps answer your question.

 

[Ed Fuqua]

Here is a modest description of the process:

I make entire basses from blocks of wood (many species); sometimes from logs or boards that I purchase. Many times I've cut the trees or harvested naturally downed trees, bucked them by hand with a giant crosscut saw and then into billets with a sledgehammer and a wedge, patiently air dried them for years, and made the whole instrument from that. Additionally, I've made them from carbon fiber, aluminum, lexan, and a few other materials. There was a time when as a young grommet, I worked for the US forest service as a backcountry ranger in the John Muir WIlderness and cut giant redwoods by hand. One slice would take two of us 8+ hours with a two person 14 foot long crosscut saw.

If I were to make my own bridge blanks from a block of raw wood, the billable hours would be negligible. Most commercial bridge blanks still need about 3-5 hours "messin' with". When I first started, it seemed like they took a couple of days. Now I'm reasonably proficient and have a good process worked out with some dedicated jigs and such, but there is so much variability in bass geometry that they still need a lot of hand work. I'll call it 80% semi skilled and 15% skilled work.

For whatever combination of reasons, the violin building world has centuries of tradition whereby most builders always make the body and the neck, but they tend to purchase all of the other fittings: bridges, tuning machines / pegs, tailpieces, et cetera from shops that specialize in the production of fittings.

Commercial bridge blanks arrive very oversized, need to have the feet fit, guillotined, adjusters cut, drilled, & tapped, the entire top needs to be profiled and shaped, then lastly it gets cleaned up to look nice and usually varnished so it does not look like a young boomer struttin' a pair of white velcro tennies in 1983 (or half of talkbass last Tuesday!!!). If an uncut commercial bridge blank costs me an average of $75 (without the adjusters) and I needed to make ten of them, I'd make up a series of pattern or routing jigs (no cnc in my shop) and I could make 10 of them in an easy day. Once I got good at it, probably 2-3 times that amount; maybe one every 20 minutes. (In a factory it would be one every 20 seconds, cnc or not). If I conservatively billed that out at $75 per hour ( many shops charge double or more that), then I just saved $50 off purchasing a commercial bridge.

I make all kinds of hipster bridges for my own projects; when they come that way, nobody complains. 90% of my customers, given a choice, like seeing that Despiau brand visible every time they look down at the bridge and they also often like the familiarity of the shape....so it seems like I buy enough Despiau's every year to purchase a decent running car. My most satisfying bridge dork days look more like this:


View attachment 7125182


'Hope that helps answer your question.

Yes, thanks! Nice getting a picture of start to finish!