Post 41: First Stringing It

   I have been trying to decide for a while how exactly to design the tuners. There are basically two options with a headless guitar:

            1)  Thread the string thru a hole at the head and have a screw on the tuner to secure the string.

           2)   Thread the string thru a hole in the tuner and attach it with a screw at the head.

    My original intention was to go with #1, and I made several possible tuner heads.  But the idea of the head simply having 7 holes instead of an anchoring block sounded attractive, so I made a tuner with a screw to attach the string just to see.  The basic brass blanks I cut for the tuners can be fashioned either way once I finally make up my mind:

    I also worked on the bridge unit: cut an ebony base plate, cut out a rectangular notch for the wide piezo flat sensor, attached it with two brass screws to the guitar top, finished shaping and polishing the two brass side pieces, cut  a wider strip of ebony to fit the sensor, and glued the two brass strips to the base plate with cyanoacrylate glue. 

     I then made a bone blank for the nut, drilled a hole at the head, and strung the middle string for a test.  

          I wrapped the other end of the string around a screw in the tuner head, tightened it, and stretched the string. It worked. 

          The following picture shows a close-up of both the bridge and the tuner. There will be a bone strip inlaid in the ebony to hold the strings, and since that strip is wide, I want to come up with a way to adjust the intonation using seven separate adjustable bridges.  There are several ways to do that: cutting 3 long parallel grooves in the ebony to fit thin bone strips or cutting seven dovetail grooves where matching bone bridges can slide for finer adjustment.

       The string is too high both at the nut and the bridge and I will work on that later. But first, I wanted to know if the piezo worked and what the sound was like, so I connected it to my big amp thru a preamp and was pretty satisfied. For a reason I cannot understand yet, the sound is soft when the string is plucked down, but much sharper when the string is plucked up. I can only guess it has to do with the fairly sharp angle of the bridge in relation to the strings.