A regular customer of ours called with an irregular request. Could we make him a guitar with a rubber bridge? It’d need to be old and battered looking but play and intonate nicely. The aim of the rubber bridge being to deaden the sound and give it the old fashioned, plinky plonk, Americana blues sound. Almost like a banjo. Did we have anything lying around that might be a good doner guitar? No we didn’t… we had something that was a challenge and was free…
The old Silvertone had been sat in Nige’s garage for a few years. Originally it would just have been a basic student guitar. Probably never sounded good or felt that nice to play but perfect for one of these rubber bridge projects that our customer was interested in. It did have one or two problems that needed attending to before we could stick a bridge on it but we like a challenge!
There were a few little cracks that needed closing and securing…
We needed to sort the old tuners out. They still worked ok but needed a bit of TLC. We’d also need a new nut as the original was beyond redemption. Decided that a nice piece of bone would be better than the shoddy old bit of plastic that was in before anyway.
The entire top was warped. All the bracing for the soundboard had either come loose or fallen out of the guitar completely. Thought it might help to get the top a little flatter before attempting to refit anything though…
More of the warped top and of course the fretboard had come off too (add that to the list of tasks!)
Getting a bit off steam into the guitar (methods courtesy of Heath Robinson), certainly wouldn’t do this on anything particularly valuable but was given the go ahead to experiment on this guitar…
Plenty of clamps and cauls to force the body back into a guitar-ish shape. When it was finally all strapped up it was set aside for a month or so to cool down and dry out.
Pretty happy with the results when the clamps came off.
It still needed loads of work to get the braces back in place and glue up all the cracks but it was way easier to do now the guitar was settled in its correct shape.
more bracing fixes going on…
The back of the neck had been a bit gunky and battleworn so just sanded it back to the bare wood and finished it with oil & wax. There’s those fixed up tuners too.
… And again with the new bone nut…
With the back and sides it was a case of rubbing down with sandpaper until all the dirt and remaining lacquer was removed. Then it got buffed up, same as the neck, with fine wire wool, oil & wax…
After glueing all the cracks decided to go with a quite extreme cosmetic choice. The staples probably add a bit more strength but they’re mainly aesthetic. Borrowed this idea from our friend Mark Davies.
The rubber bridge ended up being a modified version of the original bridge. Tried a few different materials and ended up going with a section of guitar lead.
Stuck the fretboard back on and got the frets level enough without too much drama. Finished off with a set of Silk & Steel strings to really get that dead sound we were after.