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To make bridges for a guitar you have to start somewhere. As you will see I use my oscillating spindle sander a good bit for this task as well as my belt sander. I start with a pattern that was a reject from Martin. This is my basic bridge . Here is the order of this process

1st stock material , It may be any wood you want , in this case I have ebony. I start by running it though my sander. How you do this can vary but you want to get your stock to about 3/8" thick by 6" by 1 1/2".

With sized stock you can start the production process. In all processes you want repeatability. I use a series of simple stop jigs that can be clamped to my sander. You can rig something similar to a drum sander on a drill press , or even work by hand.
In this set I start with the sized blank and set up the stops using my pattern. Note the clamp setting the stop using the pattern as my guide

Making the rough blank is not that hard . I will use a band saw to rough out the blank using a pattern to mark the wings. Then I will use the sander and sand them to the stop. flip the blank and do the other side.

Now that we have the wings we need to make them a bit more refined . I will set up another stop jig for this. In this process I will rough the shape on the saw and clean it up on the sander using the stop jig.

here are more pics of the wing process.

Now we have the wings defined , and we need to get the belly . I will mark this out with the pattern and sand this using the pattern as my guide. The trick here is to maintain square. As long as you are close you can refine later. I like to do these in a run of 6 to 8 as the repetition of this helps you to dial in muscle memory.

Now we need to set the radius of the top of the bridge. I use a 16 inch pattern I made from a bridge , I trace that and then sand it using the belt sander .

I can see I need to make more use of my Robo sander and drill press.
Thanks for posting these pics, I am now planning on making a simple sanding station for the drill press with a fence so I can do similar steps on the contouring.

Kevin

That can be a handy tool. The best jigs are the simple ones

Really nice John. Thanks for posting this. It's definitely going into my notes stash =)

When do we get "Bridge Blanks 201 - Saddle Slots and Bridge Pin Holes" ? =)