So, I had kind of a mishap a few weeks ago: the original bridge of my Vihuela de Mano ripped clean off when I tried to bring the strings to tension. Might be that the glue surface was too cold or the natural oil in the rosewood prevented a proper bond. Or the glue surface was simply too small for 42kg of string tension.
After some consideration, I decided to redesign the bridge to be more of a lute style (with 3x the glue surface of the original bridge), while trying to preserve the original look. It’s now made of cherry, with ebony and ivory inlays.
That is just gorgeous!! What a wonderful job you’ve done! I’m sorry that the first iteration of the bridge didn’t work out right, but good on you and your problem solving skills for figuring out what tweaks were needed to get it to work.
This is just SO beautiful! I hope it’s as enjoyable for you to play as it is for me to look at it 😍
Absolutely beautiful. Does it play fretless or is it mean to be played with tied frets like a saz?
It’s supposed to have frets, but I haven’t tied them yet.
How many fingers do you have?
Is this the full instrument, with the layered sound hole design that was posted a few weeks ago?
Yup. Still needs some varnishing and setup work.
Looks great with the rest of the body!
That’s a beautiful design in the center
Incredible job! What wood are you using on the body? I tried making a guitar on a budget a while back, and the whole body arched in half.
The body is caribbean rosewood. The back is slightly domed and the top slightly arched inwards for some extra rigidity.
Good looking axe! What is the tuning?
The tuning is the same as a 7-course renaissance lute, except the chantarelle (the highest course) is a double course instead of just one single string:
g4/g4, d4/d4, a3/a3, f3/f3, c3/c4, G2/g3, F2/f3
Sounds like it’ll make for fun chord shapes. I’d leave it fretless for a while if it were mine.
Damn, that’s a sexy instrument.
I love the details on the design. Is it tuned like a normal 12 string guitar? It looks like a relatively small scale length.
It has the same scale length as a renaissance lute (ca. 600mm) and is also tuned like one.
