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1) After carefully marching down the line to get my spacing right, I screw on a couple of stops to hold the blanks

2) With a blank captive in the jig and me pushing both jig and blank firmly against the fence, I drill the holes

3) Works great

1) Ready for the next step

2) Now for a saddle slot. Looked at a lot of designs and am going for simple. Here are the pieces that will hold the bridge blank and at the same time be the base for the router. The wedge was a piece of stained scrap Sitka and I planed it a bit to level it with the top of the other pieces. These pieces are 1/2" thick, a bit thicker than the blank

3) I have added the fences. The one on the left is accurate to the slot, that one won't change. The one on the right is adjustable to keep a tight fit with the router base

1) The fences are also 3/4" thick so I can easily angle the router into the blank without side-to-side movement. I'm sticking on small pieces of masking tape with a blue marker edge to mark the slot limits

2) Once I got the jig made, I did the whole batch in 10 minutes. From the bottom - Corian, Ebony, faux Ivory, 2 Brazilian Rosewood, 2 Maple for trials, and 3 pine for trials

3) Now I tape pairs of them with faces together, and drill a 1/2" hole down the centerline on each side

1) Working Brazilian Rosewood is just fantastic for a chocolate lover like me - smells like double chocolate brownies

2) Now for the pyramids

3) I copied a fellow loofier's jigs for making the pyramids. Thanks lay. One is a fence that is clamped to the bandsaw table and the other two to make the pyramids on the faces and the sides

1) First on the ends

2) Now on the sides - both of these cuts would not be hard to do with a chisel

3) All that's left is the handwork. Once the jigs were made, I bet I don't have 15 minutes into each one of these and the handwork will take loooonger than that

1) With files and sandpaper I round the top side-to-side by eye to match the template

2) I made a pencil line that defines the ends of the rounding

3) Screw it onto a jig and work the pyramids and the round groove. There are a lot of things that could be done with the inside 2 angles on the pyramids and now I have to decide

1) For the Ebony one I have chosen the well-rounded interior edges on the pyramids. The ebony is really fun to work with chisels, various files and of course, a scraper.

2) Here are the 4 that I got 95% done. The lower one is a not-so-nice piece of Brazilian Rosewood - it had a couple of chips out of the edges and it chipped very easily while working it. Next is the Maple one - I wish bridges were made out of maple as it worked beautifully. Then the Ebony one which is my back-up for this instrument. On top is the faux Ivory bridge I want to use. On this one, I decided to work hard to get the 4 pyramid edges straight and even and leave them.

3) The faux ivory is exactly the color of the unbleached saddle blanks I got. Love the look against the Redwood. The Brazilain Rosewood one weighs 18 g, the Maple one 16 g, the Ebony 29 g, and the faux Ivory 27 g.

looks good Ed. I'm going to be making a pyramid for an old parlor guitar.

sooo nice! Saving this one for later attempts at this.

Thanks so much for showing us how you did it - I have some bubinga I was given that might make a small guitar, and a bridge like this would suit nicely.