Ever since I started 10 years ago, I have used a pyramid bridge bought from Stewmac as a template for my own pyramid bridges. That bridge is based on a Martin one. I do something more like Levin's pyramid bridge. Incidentally, Levin had two types of fixed bridges on theirs parlor guitars before 1930, one a pyramid bridge, the other a simpler bridge with three facets, two on the ends and the third along the entire back. The simpler bridges are clumsier and do not work so well with a saddle bone, they are always replaced with a pyramid. You can make the pyramid bridge from a rectangular piece of wood using only a plane, rasp and sandpaper. But I use two jigs to make the them faster and better.

The first step is to carve out two circular trenches for the transition between the pyramids at the ends and the middle. It can be done by hand with a round rasp, but it takes a long time with a high risk of chips. Nowadays, I make a sandwich with two cauls on either side of the bridge blank with the help of two clamps. A 15 mm forstner drill bit in the pillar drill machine quickly drills out the two trenches in the bridge blank, one of the two cauls being sacrificed. The bridge is 3 mm at its thinnest in the trench, I get the width of the pyramid from an old replaced Levin bridge.

The two pyramids are cut down in height to 7 mm in my small band saw, the three facets of the pyramid are rasped and ground by hand.

One thing that I have failed at sometimes is to give the surface of the middle part the curved shape found on the Stewmac pyramid bridge and at the same time having the same thickness. I needed a better method and a jig. After some thought, I made a drastic decision and split my old reference from Stewmac in half! It had been handled and dropped on the floor many times and couldn't be used in a guitar anyway. The two halves were then glued into a simple jig where I can sand the top of my pyramid bridges to the same curved shape.

The jig consists of a plywood board where the two Martin bridge halves were glued and a maple stick with an adhesive sandpaper that can slide on top of the two halves. With the jig, I can get the surface of my pyramid bridge in the right shape and with an even thickness - the latter is what I have sometimes failed at freehand. The pictures show the finished pyramid bridge in the jig after the back of it has been rounded off - the last step in manufacturing.

In the finished pyramid bridge, the string peg holes are drilled before gluing on the top, depending on how trapezoidal the fretboard is. I tape a piece of tape to the top roughly where the saddle will end up and use a ruler to follow the edges of the fretboard and make two marks on the tape. The distance between the markings is subtracted by 1 cm, which gives the distance between the centers of the outermost stringpin holes. The strings will thus end up about 5 mm into the fretboard at the 12th fret. On a Levin parlor, it is usually 68 mm measured on the tape and 58 mm between the two outermost holes. I drill the holes in a slanted line like on the Stewmac bridge to make room for the pitch of the intoned saddle.

I have just ordered a new Martin stall from Stewmac to use as a reference 🙂