What are we looking at in this photo? Pieces of a guitar pick, and maybe business cards, used as shims, on each end of the saddle slot in an acoustic guitar bridge.
If you think it’s odd that they left a gap in the middle, you get bonus points! If you’re wondering if the saddle then broke in the center due to not having support, well hang on a bit <can u feel the suspense building?>
A customer came in last week and laid a hard case on our counter. He opened the case to reveal a nice Epiphone acoustic dreadnought that he said a shop in St Petersburg told him they’d done all they could for the guitar and he should sell it or just hang it on the wall.
He’d brought it to their shop to have the action lowered and a general “setup”, but he said he got the guitar back in worse shape than when he took it in and the action was even higher.
Even worse, he said that the next day, while playing the guitar, the saddle broke right in the middle! The shop didn’t want anything more to do with the guitar, so he bought a saddle elsewhere and installed it himself.
After asking around, he was referred to our shop (Hank’s Guitar Shop). We took some measurements and discovered a series of problems – low nut slots, a neck back-bow (caused by over-tightening the truss rod), and high action (Bass strings were 0.135″ at the 12th fret).
We could only wonder at the previous shop’s actions. Did they start by tightening the truss rod to get lower action? (Yes, this will lower the action, but it’s not the purpose of a truss rod, and lowering action this way often leads to other problems) And then, discovering they’d over-done it, stuff shims under the saddle to bring the action back up? (Not realizing that leaving the center unsupported will likely cause the saddle to crack), and when they discovered they’d overdone that, they just gave up?
It was a real head-scratcher, for sure!
Two days later, with a new nut, re-adjusted truss rod, and saddle shims removed, the guitar was back in the customer’s hands and he was overjoyed with how well it played.
<Enter ‘happy-ending’ applause here!>
