I've done both. I cut the bridge and reset it to shorten the scale on a long Sohmer grand that used agrafes on the bridges. The owner wanted to keep the agrafes but duplicating that thing would have been extremely costly. Still, I needed to shorten up the strings some -- I thought 260+ lbf on the mid-tenor and lower-treble strings was a bit much! -- so I cut the bridge (underneath the frame struts) into three pieces and relocated them. I spliced in wood as needed to fill the gaps and splined the pieces back together. Worked very nicely. I've also built up existing bridges by adding thick veneers as needed and recapping. The only real downside is that to keep an appropriate width you'll probably need to take some wood off of the front side of the bridge which will almost certainly cut through some of the original veneers. Can look unsightly unless you also put a fresh piece of veneer on the front side to hide everything. In the end it comes down to which approach -- modifying the original or building up on a new body -- takes the most time and materials and costs either you or the owner them most (or least) amount of money. ddf Delwin D Fandrich Piano Design & Fabrication 6939 Foothill Court SW, Olympia, Washington 98512 USA Phone 360.515.0119 Cell 360.388.6525 del at fandrichpiano.com ddfandrich at gmail.com -----Original Message----- From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Gene Nelson Sent: Sunday, September 09, 2012 4:09 PM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: [pianotech] alternative to new bridge After calculating a new scale, I have the lower tenor part of the bridge figured ok - adding 5 bi-chords and a shorter aux bridge joined to the original. However, the upper tenor to the top is another question. >From note 53 to the lo-tenor works out very well but note 54 to the top requires that I lengthen the spl's by 10mm tapering to 3mm in order to get a decent scale. Means a big dog leg at the strut. I thought of adding material to the back side of the bridge and machining the opposite to keep the bridge width close to original. Or - possibly cutting the bridge at the strut, repositioning 3mm back at the top and just rotating it to get the 10 mm at the strut, then rejoining with epoxy and a new bridge cap and maybe a couple of filler pieces to help round it off at the dog leg. Anybody think that cutting the bridge like that would be a bad idea?? It's probably a bit less work. Gene
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