Ovation Balladeer – New Bridge in Brazilian Rosewood

The old bridge was made from walnut and had failed drastically as you can see from the pics here. I thought we should make a new bridge in something more substantial ..so the brazilian rosewood came out. I wanted to replicate the design of the original bridge as closely as possible….apart from it looking aesthetically correct, this IS a classic guitar and deserves to be treated as such… even if it is made of plastic. Ovation guitars were a side project of the Kaman Corporation whose principal product was helicopter blades donchaknow ! The routs for the string pockets were cut at a 30 degree angle so I made a custom jig to rout the slots and then the string holes at this angle. The green plastic comb like shape is a template guide which my pin router will follow to ensure the spacing is exactly correct. This worked great by the way. After routing the string slots and clearance holes, I cut out the shape and tidied it up before shaping the top, ensuring I retained the elegant curves of the original bridge. after polishing the new bridge we’re all set to glue it to the guitar. As you can see the job worked out well.