Ebony bridge caps

[Erwinspiano at aol.com]

Jd
  Nice clear post. Especially the underlined. Comments  below
  

It seems  to me that a laminated hardwood bridge is not only stiffer 
but will,  stiffness aside, transmit the vibrations more quickly and 
efficiently by  dint of the direction of the grain.  Add to that the 
virtues of ebony  or a dense rosewood (dalbergia xxx) and you have 
almost certainly a  "faster" bridge.  What surprises me is that so few 
makers have  used the simplest expedient to achieve a stiffer bridge, 
and that is to  make it taller, since the stiffness increases as the 
square of the height,  so that a 38mm bridge will be twice as stiff as 
a 27mm bridge of similar  construction and a great deal stiffer than a 
27mm bridge using ebony  laminations without the horrific cost.
  I have a 6 ft Julius Bauer that has a very tall  bridge.ie roughly 37mm  
The belly system is VERY  stiff in spite of  the lack of rib support



I'd say the question of mass is very low in importance  compared with 
questions of stiffness and speed of sound in the  bridge.  The bridge 
is a transmitter and also a filter.   The capping of the bridge in the 
top treble with a suitable hard and  dense wood reduces the filtering, 
which needs to be different in  different parts of the scale according 
to the quality of sound one  aims to achieve. 
  I especially like this above. I'm not sure I've ever  heard it explained 
that succinctly.  Or... maybe I wasn't  listening.
  Cheers
  Dale

The use  of ebony at all 
in the tenor and the bass would strike me as a pure waste  of money 
and likely also to have tonal effects that might not be  desirable.

JD

 



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