Minimum Body Thickness?

[BassUrges]

I’m going with both a long upper horn AND headless. Plan is to fit a 36” scale into a standard guitar case. And I’m considering trying to tilt the tuners downward to conceal them.

Major obstacle at the moment is the price of a headless bridge.

 

[MPU]

Nova headless bridges are not too expensive.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

Your electronics will always determine minimum thickness. My general rule of thumb is to make sure the electronics compartment area is 1 3/4" and I've never had an issue.

You could always make your own bridge, but that has nothing to do with thickness.

Good luck and happy building.
Dirk

 

[Jisch]

Nova headless bridges are not too expensive.

+1 on the Nova bridges, they are relatively lightweight, easy to tune and the strings are held well in the headstock piece.

 

[jj.833]

A guitar maker told me once that the shape and thickness of body wood is important under the strings and around the bridge, like on Les Paul's The Log . He said that the thicker wood, the better sound. He liked to make heavy, thick instruments. With a very thin body, I would expect less woody mids, more highs, and maybe bigger difference between sound of different tones/strings. All of these could be good things, I for myself like agile, headstrong instruments with lots of highs. I'd probably install a bridge where you can (but don't have to) put the string through the body.

 

[BassUrges]

I was skeptical of eBay bridges, but if those work for others it makes pushing this forward a lot easier.

 

[ctmullins]

I was skeptical of eBay bridges, but if those work for others it makes pushing this forward a lot easier.

A lot of what’s available on eBay is crap, but not all of it. The Nova stuff looks nice, and @Jisch agreed above. I would have bought Nova if they offered narrower spacing. I could fab up my own base plate with narrower spacing, but I don’t really want to expend that effort. Instead I bought ABM. On eBay.

 

[Jisch]

If you're making a four string there is another ebay headless bridge that is decent. It's probably a bit more cheaply made than the Nova, but it works fine. There are two things that are nice about this bridge 1) it holds the cut end of the string in the bridge, so the balls are on the head end, 2) the tuning knobs pull out 3/4" or so for easier tuning. Bass guitar bridge, for 4 string headless bass, black color | eBay