> > A better question to ask is why you need an adjustable bridge in the first > place? I would suspect that such constant adjustment is necessary because > the instrument is not structurally sound or the bridge is not fixed > properly.
In our experience, shimming is just a fact of life with the HG. I'm going to disagree that it indicates that the instrument isn't structurally sound, because all HG's need it from time to time. There are several factors here. There's downward pressure on the bridge, so unless the bridge has no compressibility at all, it's going to bend a little under the pressure. The pressure from the bridge gets transmitted to the brace underneath it, and from there to the soundpost, and from there to the back. All of these are going to move a little bit over time. (If they don't, then the instrument is built very, very strongly, and it's not going to resonate.) In addition to the slow sinking under pressure, there are also the factors of temperature and humidity. Wood expands and contracts - this is a physical fact that we can't get around. We can minimize the effects by keeping the instrument in a hermetically sealed, temperature controlled environment, but it's hard to play that way. > I concur with Alden and Esa; deal with the cause, not the symptom. I'm not sure I ever said that. What I said was that we'd tried it and it didn't work very well for us. > Doesn't one of Murphy's Laws go something like this: "If no one uses it, > there must be a reason..." I'll go with that, though it could just be that no one has found the right application yet. > What's next - automatic tuning a la Gibson? Don't think that we haven't thought about it. I'm just waiting for the next three generations of stepper motors to come out so we can make them radio controlled, put them inside the tuning machines and control them as a Bluetooth device. ;-) Alden
