How to Examine The Bridge of a Used Guitar: Part 2

Video Transcript

"KIP BRADFORD: Hi, my name's Kip and I'm here on behalf of Expert Village. Today, we're taking a look at used acoustic guitars and determining whether or not they would be practical to purchase with the idea that we're looking for an inexpensive playable guitar. We haven't even began to talk about the whole vintage market. Now, we've just taken a look at the bridge itself, to see if it had a saddle. We've discussed the saddle and the cost of replacing the saddle and the bridge pins. Now, we need to look at the bridge itself and see if that is going to handle the tension once we put the strings on this. Now, this wood portion, this is the bridge. And the bridge is typically made out of Rosewood. Now, this bridge is very dried out and so, your bridge and your fret board, it's a good idea to take a little lemon oil or linseed oil and rub into that occasionally to keep it from drying out and cracking, it's just a healthy thing to do for your instrument. What I like to do with the strings on, you can see this real well, but again, you won't typically find a guitar in a garage sale that's fully functional. You can find something that it kinda broke down in terms of the strings fell off and broke and nobody ever did anything with it after that. And it is common with the tension that is put on the bridge by the strings pulling for the bridge to begin to lift away from the sound board. The bridge is typically glued on with what is called high glue and if it gets warm, it softens. And so, if you leave your guitar in the backseat of your car in San Bernardino, the bridge is definitely going to begin to lift. So what you can do is just take a white piece of paper or any color really, but take a piece of paper and run that paper along the edge of the bridge. If you find places that the paper will slide under which I am doing right here, you can see that is sliding under, then you know that one, the bridge has began to separate from the sound board or two, they didn't put glue all the way to the edges at the factory. And it's this back portion that is more important than the front portion, 'cause its pulling this way. So there's downward pressure in the front, but there's an upward, not pressure but negative pressure if you will, here at the back. So, to reset the bridge, you have to actually take it off and re-glue it, clean it up and re-glue it and that can be, you know, $40 to $50 repair. This instrument, I don't get enough under there and my suspicion is, because it's not a real old instrument and the climate we live in it's just probably wasn't glued real, real good from the factory. And this won't tell me for sure I wouldn't, if it went under there a long ways and if I view down through this way and I can see a little gap, where it might be lifting a little bit, I might avoid this instrument. "